The Tiffany Dome at Chateau Big Bear Boutique Hotel in Big Bear Lake, California

In a ski town two hours from Los Angeles, in a bistro serving cocktails and bar snacks, hangs the largest Tiffany-style stained-glass dome west of Chicago — and it didn't start out anywhere near a mountain.

The 57-foot dome was originally installed in a Parisian tango house during the city's so-called "Golden Age of Brothels," a period when clandestine dance halls and pleasure houses commissioned lavish decorative glasswork to match their reputations. At some point after that chapter closed, the dome was carefully disassembled panel by panel and shipped across the Atlantic, eventually finding its way to Chateau Big Bear, a French-inspired hotel built in 1987 in the San Bernardino National Forest.

Look closely at the glass today and you can still find small pockmarks and imperfections — said to be the scars of champagne corks popped underneath it during its Parisian nightlife days. The hotel's owners have since put roughly $500,000 into restoring the dome, and it now sits above the tables of Tiffany's Bistro, the hotel's in-house restaurant and live music venue, doing exactly what it always did: presiding over a room full of people having a good time, just several thousand feet higher up and several thousand miles from home.