The Last Resorts

By Valli Herman / Photographs by Kevin J. Miyazaki



One early spring day, as forklifts hauled stacks of plywood down dusty paths and electricians strung wiring through a future restaurant’s walls, Todd Majcher hiked up a gravel trail that defines the edge of what was becoming Terranea Resort, a 582-room luxury destination set to open later this month.

Here on a nub of land in Rancho Palos Verdes, a glorious, three-sided geological wonder of 300-foot cliffs, tide pools, and crashing waves, Majcher, Terranea’s vice president and project manager, shook his head as he talked about the 102-acre resort’s long history: meetings, official approvals, public concerns, redesigns, demolition, excavation, grading, and landscaping.

With the scheduled opening just months away, Majcher recounted the many hurdles. Half in jest, he added: “We’ve been calling this the last resort.”

He might just be right.

Building an ocean-view luxury resort is an undertaking so enormous it tests the perseverance of anyone who dares. The fundamentals required for large-scale resorts—huge chunks of gorgeous, well-located land, deep-pocketed and patient developers, and high numbers of well-funded guests—are in short supply and shrinking by the day. It’s notoriously difficult to build in upscale California communities, particularly when they also are governed by stringent land-use plans that require input from outspoken residents and layers of government agencies.

Bacara Resort & Spa in Goleta, just north of Santa Barbara, for example, is the result of 18 years of legal battles that landed in the California Supreme Court before the developer was able to open his $220 million luxury property in September 2000. In nearby Montecito, after protracted tangles with residents and governing bodies, Los Angeles shopping mall developer Rick Caruso almost gave up trying to rebuild the seaside Miramar Hotel. He finally won approval last December.

Yet, Terranea’s planned opening this month will mark the second landmark Southern California coastal resort to open within the past six months. The other, of course, is The Resort at Pelican Hill, which sits on a 504-acre bluff above Crystal Cove State Park, near Newport Beach. Billed as an ultraluxury resort, Pelican Hill isn’t so much a hotel, but a re-creation of a Mediterranean seaside city composed of 204 bungalows and 128 larger villas. The smallest one-bedroom bungalow is 847 square feet, bigger than most suites between here and Las Vegas. The villas, which have as many as four bedrooms in 3,581 square feet, outclass many homes—and not just in size.

The resorts emphasize their differences: Terranea is casual, family-friendly, and focused on corporate retreats; Pelican Hill is an ultraluxury hideaway for the elite. Yet they likely will be linked in Southern California history as the last grand coastal resorts to be built during our lifetimes. Oceanfront development is at a virtual standstill.

“There is not a lot of land left, and nothing is in the permit pipeline,” says Bruce Baltin, a senior vice president of PKF Consulting. “It is going to be a long time before we see anything like these again.”



Of what remains, nothing comes close to the opportunities presented by Terranea and Pelican Hill. (Indeed, the latest ocean-view resorts—including the recently opened 157-room Shorebreak Hotel in Huntington Beach and the long-planned 90-room boutique hotel within The Strand at Headlands development in Dana Point—are tiny in comparison.) “Where are you ever going to find 504 acres of previously undeveloped land on the California coast?” asks Gary Sherwin, president and CEO of the Newport Beach Conference & Visitors Bureau. Pelican Hill, he says, “is one of a kind in terms of its size, its scope, and the concept behind it.”

Most large parcels of such land are property of the U.S. government or power companies. Some areas already are protected, such as the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge on the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station.

“The California coastal resorts, like The Resort at Pelican Hil, are the last of an exclusive breed,” says Donald Wise, an investment banker with Johnson Capital in Napa.

Cities usually like to see them built because resorts generate occupancy taxes, which hover between 10 and 14 percent of each night’s room rate. The smallest rooms at Pelican Hill create nearly $70 a night in occupancy taxes. When a single employer can bring hundreds of jobs—nearly 650 for Terranea and 700 for Pelican Hill—then the urge to build is harder to deny. But for both new resorts, the biggest challenge may lie ahead as these palaces for the pampered try to maintain their rates and standards during the worst economic climate since the Great Depression.

Particularly now, it’s difficult to separate the idea of luxury from connotations of gilded excess. Pelican Hill, however, redefines the term by pairing a casual, residential atmosphere with hyperattentive service, a choice that seems perfectly timed, even if it weren’t always in the cards.

The twists and turns of Pelican Hill’s development aren’t fully documented, but Ralph Grippo, president of The Irvine Company’s Resort Properties, says the company entertained various plans for the pristine parcel for at least 30 years. Eventually, Irvine Company Chairman Donald Bren looked to the style of 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio to transform the last, best open parcel of the Irvine Ranch. To make it look authentically weathered, Bren ordered 750 mature olive trees transplanted from Northern California orchards onto the resort property.

Bren wanted Pelican Hill, says Grippo, “to withstand the test of time like the Palladian buildings that are 500 years old.”

Though both new resorts offer spas, golf, villa-type rooms, and ocean views, “that is where the similarities end,” says Sherwin. “Pelican Hill is like living in a gated community on the Newport Coast. They are homes. They are not hotel rooms.”

Not many homeowners have, at their disposal, a 24-hour butler and a shimmering black Bentley to shuttle them to the spa or 36 holes of golf. The villa portion is designed as a gated enclave within, but separate from, the resort. Guests have an exclusive villa clubhouse, dining room, and pool with private cabanas. With interiors that feel like California-casual townhouses, the villas also come with gourmet kitchens, attached garages, and terraces that open to panoramic, enviable ocean views. The smallest costs $1,450 a night.

The bungalows are clustered around the pool, spa, and restaurants, and feel more like a hotel, minus elevators or long hallways. For a starting rate of $695 a night, guests can live like the multi-
millionaires whose mansions line the adjacent cliffs.

Unlike Terranea, the Pelican Hill villas aren’t for sale; every room is owned and managed by The Irvine Company or its subsidiaries. Resorts frequently offer fractional ownership in adjacent condominiums or residential-style suites to help fund construction of the resort, or to satisfy laws requiring that portions be rented to the public like hotel rooms.

“If you take a fractional-ownership model,” says Grippo, “then you have 1,000 part owners who may wish it to be something different.” The goal at Pelican Hill, he says, is to focus on the guests and only the guests.



Pelican Hill’s concept is new for Southern California, says Sherwin: “It is designed for people who really crave privacy. If you want to disappear and have people take care of you … Pelican Hill is the place.”
Yet the enormous Coliseum Pool may coax modern-day Garbos out of hiding. Two stories of lounge chairs and 18 tricked-out cabanas surround the pool, a dazzling 136 feet in diameter. Not only is it reportedly the world’s largest circular pool, but it’s also one of the few places where attendants spritz guests with Evian, offer them chilled towels, and clean their sunglasses, lest a smudge ruin the view.

Just because you build it, though, doesn’t mean they’ll come. And Giuseppe Lama, Pelican Hill’s managing director, isn’t taking chances. Over a dinner of costoletta di vitello alla Milanese (veal cutlet) and pasta made on-site with imported flour at Andrea, the resort’s fine-dining northern Italian restaurant, Lama details his marketing plans.

First, he’s taking care of the locals—600,000 of whom he says are millionaires living within an hour’s drive. Like Terranea, he’s reaching out to Southern Californians who may opt for “staycations” that let them skip airfare. Then, Lama is taking on the world.

“We aim for international primacy,” he says. “I’m taking my show on the road.” He intends to travel with executive chef Jean-Pierre Dubray and a tuxedoed butler who will arrive in a limousine and deliver gifts to select decision makers in key feeder markets, such as New York, Dallas, Miami, and Chicago, with Moscow and Dubai in line for next year. “They’re going to say, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy.’ ”

It might seem insane, but this also is the resort team that conducted 21,000 interviews to find staffers able to execute the resort’s motto: “The possibility of perfection.” This is the company that built nine kitchens to hold nearly 90 chefs and cooks, who work in shifts for 12 food and beverage outlets. And this is where guests in every room can expect to find, of all things, a toaster—because toast that has to traverse 500 acres guarantees the possibility of imperfection.

Lama insists that Pelican Hill was designed to feel accessible, even if three Ferraris are parked outside the Coliseum Pool & Grill, next to the resort’s vintage Rolls-Royce, on a recent Saturday. The prices for the food, rooms, and spa services are below others in its luxury class, locally and nationally. A $16 Pelican Hill room service breakfast can cost $25 at the competition.

Regardless of price, there’s undeniable value in spending the day in a cabana overlooking the Pacific while waiters bring tropical drinks and fresh towels. Suffering through nasty economic times can fuel the need to hole up in a beautiful spot, insulated from the tumultuous world outside.

Terranea offers a similar experience, but in a very different way. With a 360-room hotel, a public walking path and beach at its rim, and room for multiple weddings and meetings, Terranea isn’t aiming to be an exclusive retreat, rather, quite the opposite. The resort has taken pains to involve and reflect community members, whether they’re environmental stewards, local artists, or nearby families.

The privately owned, Brentwood-based Lowe Enterprises spent nearly 10 years planning Terranea, and at least $450 million, up from an originally budgeted $320 million, according to Terri Haack, executive vice president and managing director.

Terranea sits at what once was Marine-land of the Pacific, a theme park that, when it opened in 1954, was the world’s largest oceanarium. Though the attraction closed in 1986 and the site lay mostly dormant for the next 20 years, it lived on in millions of fond memories. Though public sentiment favored some action on the long-closed site, “the community and the surrounding area fiercely protected this site against development,” says Haack.

Terranea’s developer had to come up with a plan that respected people such as Irvine resident Alison Brown, daughter of the former park’s curator of mammals, who is saddened “to think of our last pristine ocean vistas and headlands going to the highest commercial bidder.”

 So far, Lowe seems to have walked a fine line. Don Robarge, founder of the Palos Verdes Divers Association, has been watching the resort development on Sunday dives for at least five years. “I hated this thing coming in,” he says.

Yet he and his group applaud the new public shower, picnic and snack-bar facilities, and water-reclamation systems that have kept the Long Point waters clean since construction began. If public access or water quality diminishes, he promises, “We’ll be on them in a heartbeat.”

Terranea isn’t marketing itself as a five-star destination; more like a high four, says Haack, who wants staff to deliver luxury “in a way that’s more comfortable.” Toward that goal, the hotel rooms, the bungalows, and the larger casitas are designed to appeal to couples and families with a warm, residential feeling—sandy tones, plush, inviting upholstery, and plenty of ways to enjoy the view. Nightly rates are more approachable than many other oceanfront resorts’. They’re expected to begin at around $300. Casitas may go up to $5,000 in the high season.

Haack also is aiming for the lucrative corporate meetings market. The resort can hold the entire office, with 60,000 square feet of indoor meeting space and 75,000 square feet outside in the ocean air.

Will Terranea and Pelican Hill survive? The question hovers like a cloud, because occupancy rates at Orange County’s luxury hotels dropped by as much as 30 percent between March 2008 and this past March, according to Smith Travel Research. Terranea’s developer even approached the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council in May pleading for tax relief until the economy improves.

Renewed attention to corporate responsibility means businesses are getting tight-fisted about travel expenses. “These people don’t want to be skewered for spending a lot on business trips,” says Wise, the Napa managing partner, noting the public flogging that insurance giant and bailout recipient AIG got for its pricey retreat last fall at the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort & Spa in Dana Point. Demand for such lavish places may be washing away like footprints on the sand.

But history is on their side. On Feb. 23, 1929, the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa opened. Now it’s a landmark that some say launched Arizona as a resort destination. Three California coastal resorts—the St. Regis, the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay, and Bacara Resort & Spa—all opened during the 18 months before the 2001 terrorist attacks, and all are still in business.

What’s most remarkable about the two newest California coastal resorts is perhaps their easy-going atmosphere. With their surf-and-sand hues, unstuffy service, and big, fluffy couches, pillows, and beds, they offer a place for weary travelers to make a serene, soft landing. Those are the kinds of places that not only are right for our times, but also, perhaps, forever.

VALLI HERMAN is the former hotel critic for the Los Angeles Times.

The Timelessness of Trees

Looking out across a landscape of mature trees and dense shrubs, it’s hard to imagine that the ground beneath two new area resorts was, until recently, idle and mostly empty.

Yet at Pelican Hill in Newport Coast and Terranea in Rancho Palos Verdes, science and magic come together to create landscapes that convey a sense of timelessness.

The 504 acres of Pelican Hill were designed to look like a Mediterranean seaside village, while reflecting the classical geometry of the Palladian-style buildings, says Bill Burton, whose Solana Beach Burton Landscape Architecture Studio took on the project.

Burton and his team scouted “all over the place” for nearly 750 mature olive trees to harvest, including groves near Bakersfield and in Northern California. With the help of a full-time arborist, Burton’s experts prepared the trees, some as tall as 50 feet, for transplantation at the resort.

“The cool thing about them is they have so much character and they are all individual,” says Burton. “When you drive down one of the streets of the resort, it automatically implies history.”

At Terranea, the landscape was designed to harmonize with the Palos Verdes community, the existing native plants, and the many “green” initiatives in place on the 102-acre peninsula. Before beginning demolition of the former Marineland of the Pacific site, project manager Todd Majcher hurried to preserve and box about 45 mature trees that had been there for nearly 50 years. The ficus, coral, and pine trees have been replanted throughout the grounds.

To restore the native plant and wildlife habitat, the resort teamed with the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy to cultivate nearly 35,000 plants, says conservancy executive director Andrea Vona. “Most of the plants are perennials and shrubs that provide cover for local species on the peninsula,” she says. The conservancy collects seeds throughout its area preserves and grows the plants at its nearby nursery.

The Terranea property includes the California sunflower, purple and black sage, and a succulent perennial herb that is unique to the Channel Islands and the coastal bluffs near Terranea—the endangered Dudleya virens, also known as Live-forever.

That’s not just a great name for a plant, but a pledge that the preserved trees help fulfill.—V.H.