Review: White Swan Inn, San Francisco – a charming take on Britain

Every once in a while, you stumble upon a humble hotel which you could live in forever. Often, like our King, it’s quietly grand, with holes in its socks. There are no waiters brandishing white napkins, standing, in their maddening way, between you and the food. And no porters with eager paws. 

The White Swan Inn, in San Francisco, is such a hotel. It has the shabbiness of the self assured, but not an untidiness from the toll of time or neglect. It feels like one of the city’s secrets, and it feels good to discover it.

It's the little things

Our animal selves can sniff out the genuine. My father [MoneyWeek founder Jolyon Connell] says it’s the little things in life that bring you the greatest joy. Those are the things they get right here. Simple things any hotel could do. A gas fire in every room. Kind staff. A sitting room modelled on an English country house, playing music that could have been chosen for me by an omnipotent AI: obscure Scottish folk songs that only a Highlander should know – surreal to the ear in San Francisco. 

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In this sitting room, you’ll find limitless tea, coffee, fruit and biscuits and an old-fashioned wooden cabinet with plates and cutlery so you can make your own sandwiches if you wish. There’s a buffet breakfast – sufficient but not overwhelmingly enormous. 

No one really eats ham, pickles or cheese for breakfast anyway, except maybe the Swiss, but the Swiss don’t stay here (unless, as in our case, they are forced to by their Scottish wives). And even though it ends at 10am, for the lazy among us, the goods are not swept away in a Germanic gesture of timeliness and tidiness – breakfast happily drifts on till the last of the hungry tummies are filled. 

There is a small garden, always sunlit, and in it a reassuring sign reading “England this way”. 

A matter of personal taste

So taken was I by my little hotel that I didn’t see much of San Francisco. As the actor Matthew McConaughey says in his new book, Greenlights, “wherever you are, give the place the justice it deserves”. He means: settle in as if you’ll be there for ever. And so I did. 

This hotel won’t please everyone. It’s a bit like stepping into a virtual reality mock-up of the quintessential English country house. But it’s charming and vaguely comical in its slightly wonky attempt to be one. 

The paintings are suspect. There’s a weird looking Yorkshire terrier with his legs amputated by tartan paint, which gives you a fright on the stairs, and a suspect stick man over the fireplace who is alarmingly jovial. The carpets, incredibly garish, would horrify at home, but somehow work. 

Its American owners know there’s one thing the Brits are good at. The American novelist Henry James said that of all the things the English have invented,  “the most perfect, the most characteristic, the only one they have mastered completely in all its details, so that it becomes a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house”. 

So you are greeted by a grandfather’s clock and portraits of the late Queen. You can play board games in the parlour and have tea by the fire. It was voted the best bed & breakfast in San Francisco by Forbes magazine. They say it suits rebels and romantics. I would add homesick Europeans to the list. 

From $215.29 a night, excluding taxes (includes breakfast). Visit whiteswaninnsf.com