California runs on hotel drama: clifftop terraces above the Pacific, a stained-glass breakfast dome in San Francisco, and an Oz author doodling chandeliers on a beachfront sandspit. A new roundup of the state's most memorable stays spans the whole map, price tags included, and doubles as a decent itinerary for a Highway 1 road trip.

At the top end sits Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, where ocean-facing suites and treehouses perch on cliffs first homesteaded as a ranch in 1867. John Steinbeck worked a summer there; today the property keeps its farm roots with a kitchen garden feeding the Sierra Mar restaurant. Doubles start around £1,468 a night — stargazing and sound baths extra. Down the coast in Santa Barbara, El Encanto's hillside bungalows date to 1913 and once hosted Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; from £555. The city's second entry, Hotel Californian, has the better backstory: it opened in June 1925 and was wrecked by an earthquake eight days later, but the surviving facade now fronts a 121-room hotel with Moroccan-tiled interiors and unusually large rooms from £315.

San Francisco's Palace Hotel, trading on the same corner since 1875 (rebuilt in 1909 after the earthquake and fire), serves breakfast under a stained-glass dome ringed by 20 Austrian chandeliers — and invented Green Goddess dressing in the kitchen behind it. Doubles from £274. In the mountains, the Ahwahnee in Yosemite has drawn well-heeled travellers since 1927, and its dark-wood Great Lounge is still the best nightcap spot after a day hiking to Half Dome or Yosemite Falls; from £362.

Los Angeles gets its share. The Sun Rose in West Hollywood stands on the old House of Blues site (Prince and Aerosmith both played there) and runs its own 100-seat concert venue; from £296. The Beverly Wilshire, open since 1928, kept Elvis in a suite for three years and filmed Pretty Woman in its lobby; from £370. Casa del Mar in Santa Monica turns 100 this year, having opened as a private beach club in 1926 for guests like Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin; from £516.

South of LA, the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach in Dana Point makes a base for whale-watching and surfing lessons, with fish tacos at its beach club (from £595). In Coronado, the white-turreted Hotel del Coronado — the world's largest resort when it opened in 1888 — has just finished a long restoration of its Victorian rooms, no two alike; from £429.

Budget travellers aren't left out. Cave Springs Resort near Dunsmuir has cabins and Airstreams under Mount Shasta, with direct river access, from just £62. Hotel Ynez in Solvang, a chicly converted 1950s motor lodge, puts you in the laid-back Santa Ynez wine country for £141. And the Stanford Inn in Mendocino, the US's only fully plant-based resort, has been family-run since 1980, with free bikes and a river-meets-ocean setting from £269.

The spread is the point: whether you want to splurge in Big Sur, sleep under Yosemite's granite walls, or park an Airstream beneath a volcano, there's a stay that earns its postcode.