Since 1974
Restored, not replaced.
Almost everything here is the building an architect from Berkeley put into this bluff fifty years ago. The 2019 work was mostly a matter of taking things off.
The building
Douglas fir, stone, and a great deal of glass.
The original compound was eleven rooms and two caretaker cottages, framed in fir milled twenty miles inland and faced in stone taken off the site. The arched windows that appear everywhere in our identity are the real windows — they were cut that way because a curve holds against wind better than a corner does.
Thirty years of salt air did what salt air does. When the property closed in 2016 the framing was sound and very little else was. The restoration replaced what had failed, in the same fir from the same mill, which is somehow still running.
Fifty years
Four dates that matter.
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1974
Built as a family compound
An architect from Berkeley builds eleven rooms and two caretaker cottages into the bluff, using Douglas fir milled twenty miles inland and stone from the site.
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1989
The first hotel
The family opens it to guests, more or less by accident, after a decade of letting friends stay. Nothing is changed except the addition of a kitchen.
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2016
Closed
Thirty years of salt air have done what salt air does. The property closes with the framing sound and almost nothing else.
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2019
Restored, not replaced
Reopened with twenty-two rooms. Every original frame that could be saved was saved; the rest was rebuilt in the same fir, from the same mill, which is still running.
How it is run
Three decisions that cost money.
One seating
The restaurant serves twenty-eight people once a night. It is the only way a kitchen this size can cook the menu it wants to cook.
No televisions
Not a statement about screens — just that every room faces something better, and a wall-mounted panel would be the only thing in the room that was not made nearby.
Staffed properly
Forty-one people for twenty-two rooms, all salaried, no tipping. It is priced into the room rate, which is why the room rate is what it is.
The land
A mile of bluff, held in easement.
The trail that runs north from the gate crosses a conservation easement rather than private ground. That arrangement predates us: the family who built the compound put the bluff into it in 1991, which is why there is nothing between here and the point and why there never will be.
It also means the trail is genuinely public. You will meet people on it who are not staying here, and that is the arrangement working correctly.
22 rooms is the maximum the septic and the water table on this parcel will carry. It is not a scarcity strategy — it is a number from a 1973 engineering report that has never stopped being true.