Hear. That’s the low hum of the freeway you hear behind me, offset by the rumble of the ice machine down the breezeway. We collect in the present day to have fun the motel, a uniquely American creature, conceived in California by the unholy embrace of the auto and the resort.
Since that starting in 1925, motels have multiplied like bunnies. They’ve been implicated in numerous crimes and liaisons. They’ve been elevated by some savvy architects, undercut by assorted chain operations and regularly left for lifeless by the aspect of the highway.
The motel turns 100. Discover the state’s greatest roadside havens — and the good stops alongside the way in which.
But sure survivors have accomplished some dramatic social climbing, particularly currently. Loads of motels have moved from funds to boutique, usually renaming themselves as inns, lodges or motels and capitalizing on their classic seems to be. Like turntables, typewriters, tiki bars and movie cameras, these midcentury motels are again, seducing millennials, Gen Z and child boomers just like the character Johnny Rose on the beloved TV sequence “Schitt’s Creek.”
“I always saw motels as a last resort, a dreaded pit stop,” stated Rose, performed by Eugene Levy, pitching Wall Road buyers. “But I was wrong. Motels have the potential of offering a window into the unique charm of small-town life.”
He vows “to revitalize the classic roadside motel for a new generation.”
Out right here in the true world, it’s occurring.
These days you possibly can spend $1,000 an evening in a born-again California motel. You’ll be able to order “eight-minute eggs” together with your Champagne brunch (Le Petit Pali, Carmel), browse in a curated bodega (Lodge Wren, Twentynine Palms), nosh on caviar (Skyview Los Alamos), borrow a small automotive (Surfrider Lodge, Malibu), or ease the planet’s miseries by reaching for tree-free bathroom paper (Pearl Lodge, San Diego).
The cursive yellow signal on the Pearl reverberates with ’50s vibes.
(Megan Morello / For The Instances)
But in the event you’re nervous about cash in these nerve-racking instances, you possibly can nonetheless discover a mom-and-pop operation with excessive requirements, a protracted household historical past and — generally — charges that dip underneath $100. You’ll be able to even discover a kind of that options concrete teepees (San Bernardino’s Wigwam Motel, run by a household with roots in India).
In different phrases, it’s a large, large motel world on the market, too broad to suit into one highway journey. And so, in honor of the motel centennial, I took a highway journey. Properly, a couple of highway journeys.
All advised, I coated about 2,500 miles, all inside California, stalking properties born between 1925 and 1970, avoiding the large chains, sleeping in a brand new room each evening. The way in which I outlined a motel? If a lodging’s visitor rooms open on to the outside and there’s a parking zone helpful, business consultants say, it in all probability was born as a motel or motor lodge. Particularly if it’s a low-rise constructing with fewer than 60 rooms, brick partitions and a VACANCY signal seen from the road. However house owners can name their lodgings what they like — or flip them to different makes use of.
On the way in which, I discovered a couple of landmark motels that don’t take in a single day company in any respect. I additionally discovered how the state’s Undertaking Homekey — conceived to accommodate individuals prone to homelessness — bankrolled the acquisition and conversion of greater than 30 Southern California motels and motels from 2020 to 2024, with blended outcomes.
Now, buckle up and let’s roll the montage of previous postcards, weathered neon indicators and swooping Googie rooflines, then zoom to the spot the place motel historical past started.
The Mo-Tel is born
The primary cease, I knew, wanted to be a scruffy lot alongside U.S. 101 on the japanese fringe of San Luis Obispo.
That is the place a car-loving Pasadena architect named Arthur Heineman opened his first roadside lodging in December 1925, lower than a 12 months earlier than Route 66 related Chicago to Los Angeles. Having seen the primary trip camps and motor courts spring up throughout the nation, Heineman hatched the thought of constructing one halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
After a couple of false begins, he known as his place the Milestone Mo-Tel, combining motor and resort. Later it turned the Motel Inn. Heineman gave the buildings Mission Revival options and deliberate to construct 18 statewide, his personal mission system.
That by no means occurred. However Heineman’s lodging endured for many years and the phrase motel caught on. As the auto reworked American life and roadside business tradition lit up like a brand new neon gentle, that phrase unfold.
However we’re not lingering on the Motel Inn. It shut down in 1991 and far of the previous advanced has been leveled. Regardless of a proposal for a brand new resort that obtained native planning fee approval in 2023, the positioning remained idle as of March 7. An uninspiring signal nonetheless stands, together with a Mission-style workplace constructing, bell tower and a single wall from the previous restaurant. For somebody who prizes roadside Americana, that is the visible model of the unhappy trombone sound.
Thankfully, the Madonna Inn — the visible model of an accordion orchestra — is simply three miles away. Below a giant pink signal.
When one California fortress just isn’t sufficient 
At he Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Alex Madonna drew on his Swiss background and gave the inn a mountain-chalet look.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances)
These days the Madonna Inn is an unlimited enterprise with eating places, bakery, bar, stables subsequent door and 110 visitor rooms — every completely different, every with its personal postcard within the inn’s three reward outlets. It’s so ornate, so frothy with kitsch, it’s important to smile. However when Alex and Phyllis Madonna opened in late 1958, the inn was a 12-room experiment.
The timing will need to have appeared proper. Motels had been multiplying nationwide for greater than 30 years, usually including swimming swimming pools to lure extra households or adopting elaborate themes to face aside.
On Columbus Avenue in San Francisco, a round Villa Roma motor resort rose up (till it was leveled within the ’80s). Farther north in Crescent Metropolis, a person named Tom Wyllie constructed the 36-room Curly Redwood Lodge out of a single redwood tree in 1957. You’ll be able to nonetheless sleep there, usually for lower than $80.
However right here’s what gave the Madonnas a vital enhance on their motel in San Luis Obispo: Earlier that 12 months, the state of California had opened the ornately furnished Hearst Citadel in close by San Simeon as a vacationer attraction. As soon as the Madonna Inn opened that December, a traveler from L.A. may sleep at one lavishly embellished only-in-California fortress on the way in which to a different. Legions nonetheless do.
Scenes from the Madonna Inn. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances)
(Nic Coury / For The Instances)
“It is the grandest motel of them all,” roadside design skilled John Margolies as soon as wrote, “and it is the definitive expression of an individually owned and operated hostelry — light-years removed from the almost scientific sameness of the large franchised chains.”
Growth, bust and growth once more in San Francisco
From San Luis Obispo I drove on to San Francisco, ignoring Union Sq., North Seaside and Fisherman’s Wharf, heading for the straight a part of Lombard Road. That’s the half that carries U.S. 101 visitors by the Marina district on its strategy to the Golden Gate Bridge, and it’s stuffed with previous motels. Of their classic indicators and often-weary façades, you possibly can see proof of the business’s growth and the decline that adopted.
Alas, by 1964, they had been already starting to get much less fascinating. As soon as the primary era of mom-and-pop motels prospered, the primary chain operations arose and adopted, focusing on vacationers who wished no surprises. Two of the most important chains, the truth is, had been born in Southern California — Motel 6 in Santa Barbara and Travelodge in San Diego.
Because the nationwide freeway system grew by the Sixties and ’70s, extra chain operations positioned themselves to gather freeway drivers. Alongside the now-much-quieter freeway, the previous mom-and-pop operations died off or had been devoured up and “reflagged” by the chains.
By 1980, the freeway system and the chain motels had been thriving. Motels, not a lot.
However in 1987 — in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, of all locations — a 26-year-old Stanford MBA named Chip Conley tried one thing that modified the motel narrative. He purchased a bedraggled previous place known as the Caravan Lodge and dubbed it the Phoenix, with Miss Pearl’s Jam Home as its on-site restaurant and bar. Then he positioned the property as a hotelier’s model of Rolling Stone journal, all wrapped round a playfully painted pool. And he provided free massages and bus parking to touring musicians’ highway managers.
The Phoenix Lodge is a part of the hipster-friendly Bunkhouse resort group. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances)
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances)
And lo, the bands got here, together with the Crimson Scorching Chili Peppers, Sinead O’Connor, M.C. Hammer, ok.d. lang, Laurie Anderson, Etta James, David Bowie, Bo Diddley and Deborah Harry. Because the Phoenix flourished, Conley revived dozens extra motels and small motels, conceived a model known as Joie de Vivre, then bought it to Marriott.
The Phoenix has much less momentum now. Its restaurant opens just for particular occasions and the Tenderloin’s crime and blight persist. If I had been within the metropolis with kids, I’d sooner keep close to Lombard Road on the Motel Capri or Lodge Del Sol (which expenses a staggering $45 for parking however has a pool).
Then once more, a brand new proprietor took over the Phoenix final August — Michel Suas, a celebrated Bay Space pastry chef. If any Phoenix can rise from the ashes twice, it’s this one.
Rethinking rooms for a brand new era
In the meantime, up and down California, there’s a brand new era of motel entrepreneurs and designers following Conley’s lead, rethinking what it means to be a motel. Although the nationwide variety of motels dwindled to an estimated 16,000 by 2012, reclamation initiatives have been multiplying.
Kenny Osehan’s Ojai-based Shelter Social Membership manages six reclaimed California motels in Ojai, Santa Barbara, Los Alamos and Solvang.
The Beverly Hills-based Kirkwood Assortment consists of 11 redone California motels and motels.
The Santa Barbara-based Casetta Group has opened 4 redone Southern California motels and motels, with two extra opening quickly in Los Angeles and Taos, N.M.
The San Luis Obispo-based Nomada Lodge Group has relaunched 5 motels and motels alongside the Central Coast.
None of these firms existed earlier than 2012. All are nonetheless rising and buying and selling on the concept that a lodging with 30 rooms feels friendlier than one with 300.
Drive south from San Francisco with a motel geek — which you’re now doing, by the way in which — and the born-again motel variations roll previous like Kodachrome pictures in a slide present.
On the Glen Oaks Resort Adobe Motor Lodge in Massive Sur, the rooms huddle on the fringe of a thick forest. You flip an old-school metallic key in your door and discover a room stuffed with stylishly recycled furnishings — woodsy however luxe, with yoga mats leaning in a nook.
A vintage-style key at Glen Oaks Motor Lodge in Massive Sur.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances)
On the Cambria Seaside Lodge, the place when you might need discovered a bedside Gideon Bible or a Magic Fingers vibrating mattress, now you borrow a motorcycle to trip by Moonstone Seaside or bathe with a number of the motel’s goat’s milk cleaning soap.
Rolling by Paso Robles, you confront a generational motel selection. You’ll be able to search reassurance on the Melody Ranch Motel with its tidy, fundamental rooms, Gideon Bibles, second-generation household administration and charges round $100 an evening. Or you possibly can head to Farmhouse Paso Robles or the River Lodge, each of which have been up to date dramatically by the Nomada Group.
“It’s not that we set out to refurbish motels, necessarily,” Nomada associate and artistic director Kimberly Walker advised me. “One thing we are passionate about is giving old buildings a new chapter. We can’t ever see ourselves buying a piece of land and starting from scratch.”
Clockwise, from above: In April 2024, River Lodge reopened as a retro-chic boutique lodging. (Jacob Tovar / For The Instances) Melody Ranch Motel has a first-rate spot on Spring Road, the principle artery of Paso Robles. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances) A cocktail on the River Lodge. (Jacob Tovar / For The Instances)
With the very best previous motels, “There was just so much personality and thought put into what these buildings look like that they’re able to be reconceptualized again,” Walker stated. “You can always find one thing to start your design journey with, and then build off of that.”
Two of the most important challenges, Walker stated, are parking and bogs. On the River Lodge, Skyview Los Alamos and Lodge Ynez in Solvang, Walker’s crew moved the parking space farther from rooms, making extra space for greenery and patios. In small bogs, the crew has deployed fancy tiles, numerous gentle and glass partitions as a substitute of bathe curtains.
Particularly at Skyview, the mix of Modernist and farmhouse design parts yields entertaining outcomes. Agrigoogie, anybody?
After which there’s the query of these cool previous indicators that say motel.
“When we first bought Skyview, and I hate that I did this, but I was like, ‘Maybe we should change the sign from “motel” to “hotel,”‘” Walker confessed. “I’m so glad that I didn’t follow through with that, because the motel sign is the beacon. Guests love taking their pictures with the sign.”
In Cayucos, design veterans and hospitality newbies Ryan and Marisa Fortini confronted the same query after they purchased and renovated an previous motor inn on the principle drag. They selected to lean even tougher into the m-word and known as their mission the Pacific Motel. It opened in 2022.
And now the Fortinis are doing it once more. In 2023 they purchased the close by Cayucos Motel. To date, that still-open property stays as beach-rustic-plain because the Pacific Motel is beach-rustic-chic. However extra modifications are coming and Ryan Fortini shared with me a brand new phrase which will assist describe them.
“Motique,” he stated. “A boutique motel.”
The Pacific Motel in Cayucos. (Jacob Tovar / For The Instances)
(Jacob Tovar / For The Instances)
Motel variations: Scorching springs, beachfront perches and iconic signage
The farther south you go, whether or not on the coast or within the desert, the broader the range appears to get.
On the Surfrider Malibu, company ordinarily have unique entry to a roof-deck restaurant, a number of loaner surfboards and a pair of Mini Coopers — however some facilities are on maintain because the resort accommodates many company displaced by the Palisades hearth in January.
Within the boulder-strewn hills between San Diego and Calexico, the revivers of the once-moribund Jacumba Scorching Springs Lodge have rebuilt that resort (which opened in 2023) with geothermally heated swimming pools and a world desert theme.
On a pier in San Diego’s Pacific Seaside, there’s been no dramatic rebirth — as a result of none was obligatory. The tidy cottages of the Crystal Pier Lodge, run by the identical household since 1961, nonetheless look a lot as they did within the Thirties, tide lapping under, reservations required months forward. (And it’s important to make them by telephone or in individual.)
“The motel thing is coming back,” stated normal supervisor Julie Neal, sounding shocked. “It’s actually kind of cool now.”
Out within the desert, the place Midcentury Fashionable design has by no means gone out of fashion, there have been revived motels left and proper.
Probably the most subdued of these was one of the vital tempting: Lodge Wren in Twentynine Palms, which solely opened in March, a 12-room, high-end retreat with muted colours, monumental rooms, customized furnishings and poolside mountain views.
The least subdued? That will be the previous Ruby Montana’s Coral Sands Inn, in Palm Springs.
My household and I booked a lot of the place with mates a number of years in the past, and I used to be struck then by how entertaining it was to sleep, learn and play in a seven-room motel that had been painted pink and full of thrift-shop tchotchkes and classic furnishings.
Properly, Ruby’s gone now, and the Trixie Motel (its title since 2022) is proof that even when one hotelier goes wild, there’s nonetheless room for the subsequent one to go wilder. Particularly if that subsequent proprietor is a drag queen.
The motel continues to be pink, however now staffers put on pink outfits, each room has its personal customized thematic wallpaper (Atomic Bombshell, Pink Flamingo, Yeehaw Cowgirl). Barbie dolls cavort within the workplace and stylish individuals fill the motel’s Barbara bar. Subsequent to all this, the Madonna Inn seems to be like simply one other Ramada.
Drag queen Trixie Mattel, David Silver and Staff Trixie (together with inside designer Dani Dazey) purchased the motel, renovated and reopened it in 2022. It’s now pinker than ever.
(David Fotus / For The Instances)
(David Fotus / For The Instances)
The highway forward runs by the center of nowhere
As a result of the purpose of a motel is that can assist you towards someplace else, there’s no good strategy to finish a motel journey. However Amboy works.
It’s a twentieth century ghost city alongside Route 66, about 45 miles northeast of Twentynine Palms. Roy’s Motel & Cafe stands there like a forgotten stage set, topped by an iconic 1959 signal whose guarantees are all false.
Roy has been gone for many years. With potable water in brief provide, neither the cafe nor the motel nor its six roadside cottages have been open because the Eighties. However Roy’s has fuel, snacks and souvenirs, which is sufficient to appeal to movie crews, selfie snappers and legions of drivers (particularly desert-smitten Europeans) on their approach between Las Vegas and Joshua Tree.
With Route 66 turning 100 in 2026, Roy’s proprietor Kyle Okura and supervisor Ken Massive are doing their greatest to by some means get the six roadside cottages up and renting earlier than that 12 months is over. (Who can resist a centennial?)
It’s too quickly to inform if that rebirth will occur. Nonetheless, the highway warriors come, together with off-duty trucker Chris Birdsall, 51, of Omaha, who turned up shortly earlier than sundown one current day.
“I want to see the sign lit up,” he stated.
Quickly after, Roy’s assistant supervisor Nicole Rachel known as Birdsall into the previous motel workplace, confirmed him the three switches that management the 50-foot signal and invited him to do the honors.
Birdsall did his bit, then grinned like a child because the motel signal blinked to life in purple, blue and yellow like a neon mirage or a road-tripper’s dream.
Rachel usually invitations guests to throw the switches, she advised me. However even in the event you don’t get that privilege, I can’t consider a greater place to face on the blacktop and picture what may be down the highway.
Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Instances
