Modern Santa Monica

Sat. February 28 - Sun. March 1 | 2026

Santa Monica, Calif.

Spend the day at one of the world’s premier modern art festivals, check into an appropriately sleek-lined boutique hotel, and dine at one of California’s most future-forward French bistros.

Modern art, modern food, modern luxury. Only this weekend in Santa Monica.

This weekend includes:

Tickets to Frieze Los Angeles, the headline event of LA Art Week.

A suite at the Huntley Hotel. Restrained and luxe without being nearly as stuck up as it has a right to be. Incredible city and coastal views.

Pre-paid dinner at Pasjoli, a creative French bistro with a future-forward menu from James Beard Award-winning chef Dave Beran.

As always, your stay, meal and local experience are all bookable in one click.

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Why here?

Because it’s LA Art Week, and Frieze Los Angeles has quickly become one of the most influential art events anywhere.

Frieze has its roots in the London art scene, where it debuted two decades ago as a must-see art fair showcasing outstanding contemporary works from galleries all over the world. The fair has since expanded to residencies in other cities (including LA since 2019), and this year’s Los Angeles incarnation will be quite something.

Frieze LA is more or less commandeering the parking lot of the Santa Monica Airport, putting a giant swath of it under translucent panels built into a tent-style structure, and housing the collected art of 95 international and regional galleries.

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Think Miami’s Art Basel, but with a distinctive SoCal inflection.

And those inflections make Santa Monica a superb backdrop for it all. The city is of course an arts and cultural hub in a conventional sense, but there’s also just an overarching modernist feel to the place.

Glass and light and openness predominate; a soft-modern architecture punctuates the buildings in unexpected ways, with breeze blocks and stucco pastels, all set in a pleasing relief against low-rise Craftsman bungalows.

Santa Monica defies beach-shack convention; it’s a new-feeling, warmly austere and very now kind of place.

So get yourself to the beach. Explore the inbound futures of art, food, design and hospitality, and take in as much of it as you can.

This weekend in Santa Monica discover…

The stay.

The Huntley Hotel

At The Overnightist, we don’t always go luxe with our hotel choices. But here we couldn’t resist.

The Huntley is just so perfectly appointed, with a string of subtleties and touches that make its prime beach location almost seem secondary to the visual appeal of the place. Put it in a landlocked parking lot and it would be beautiful.

We’ve seen some hotel website gallery pages in our time, but look at it. There is high-end dining, there is a spa, there is an exposed, exterior glass elevator that shoots to the top of the place.

Reserved for Saturday night.

The day.

Frieze Art Fair, LA Art Week

Frieze headlines one of the most-anticipated events on the international art calendar, LA Art Week. From within its takeover of the Santa Monica Airport parking lot (via a massive pop-up structure that willl house work form nearly 100 galleries), Frieze is a kind of artistic nerve center for a week that will see a profusion of art, openings, food and parties across the city.

Highlights under the tent — well, which is not a tent exactly, but a paneled, translucent structure that’s neither indoor nor outdoor exactly — will include gallery representation from Gagosian, Gladstone, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, White Cub and more.

Emerging artists are also a focus, and in addition to the core event, there’s an additional public exhibition series (free, by the way) spanning the airport grounds.

Admission to the show at Santa Monica Airport is included here.

The find.

Merchant Modern

Pitch-perfect stop-in for this particular weekend. As they describe themselves, Merchant is “a curation of mid-century furniture, sculpture and objects,” and there is plenty of shoppable design inspiration to be found.

The food.

Pasjoli

The menu is slight, and was written with Hemingway-like economy. There are things like ‘burger’ and ‘1/2 roast chicken’ and ‘tableside pressed duck’.

But there is no sparing on creativity here. Pasjoli’s Chef Dave Beran is a James Beard Award winner, and the restaurant itself was a James Beard finalist for best new restaurant a few years back. The food here is boundry-nudging French fare; seasonally-inspired, smart, incredibly well-reviewed

As Michelin puts it, Pasjoli is “irresistibly charming, a breezy space buzzing with activity and accented with wood beams, exposed brick and gleaming white kitchen tile.”

Pre-paid, just arrive. You have reservations on Saturday evening.

The tucked away.

Tongva Park Gardens

Modernist Santa Monica pops up in interesting places, like Tongva Park, with its striking sculpture and arching twists of latticed steel that conduct visitors through six acres of paths and gardens. All walkable from the pier.

The evening mood.

Just-After-Dark Santa Monica

We hate to be colossally generic here, but early evening, on the beach or near the pier, is peak Santa Monica. Deeply satisfying sunsets and boats a-blink out at sea.

PierBurger, which sits on the pier just before its jut into the Pacific, is perfect for later-night food-stand kinds of things.

King Suite at the Huntley Hotel. Reserved for Saturday night, Feb. 28.
Admission to Frieze LA Art Fair in Santa Monica.

Pre-paid dinner at Pasjoli, reservations at 8:15pm on Saturday evening.

Book it all in a click.

This Overnight includes: