Rodeo Drive

In Los Angeles, this is the golden street of luxury shopping: it climbs sharply, twisting along the slopes of Beverly Hills, far from the traffic jams and smog of downtown. In California, the rich have always fled any appearance of city to take refuge in the countryside, in the canyons or on the hills, creating unlikely oases in the desert. The name, Rodeo Drive, harks back to the dawn of the Yankee conquest of the Far West, when California was the homeland of chicanos and vaqueros. But the Americans don’t seem to mind. In fact, they like the country reference that nowadays goes hand in hand with the most unrestrained exclusive luxury. The commercial section of Rodeo Drive is no more than a quarter mile long, barely 500 meters of high-density concentration of limousines in which the matrons of Beverly Hills have themselves driven around by chauffeurs to do their shopping. It was in Rodeo Drive that Julia Roberts, the star of Pretty Woman, goes shopping. The street begins with the shop of Bulgari, and ends with Tiffany’s, and between the two leading jewelers, it assembles all the most important griffes, from Chanel and Saint-Laurent and Versace to Armani and Valentino and Fendi. Rodeo Drive is not just fashion shopping. All sorts of other luxury items have their display windows here. Whenever Ferrari brings out a new model, it is here that they put it on display for American buyers. There isn’t much else here: a couple of monuments, including some very private ones, such as the O’Neill House, a home designed by Don Ramos, which makes clear reference to the Catalonian architect GaudÕ, and the shopping center, the Anderton Court Building by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, quite similar to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.