The new 96-room hotel that opened last month in San Diegos Gaslamp Quarter is no ordinary lodging destination. Its profusion of jungle-like tropical greenery, a wall filled with framed nudes, and a front desk that doubles as a cocktail bar are singular enough. But a collection of past tenants that included banks, a convicted felon and a menagerie of zoo animals? Thats in a class all its own.

Meet the Granger Hotel, boutique luxury accommodations housed in a 120-year-old Romanesque-style building that required an investment of $40.5 million and nearly a decade to pull off. Its debut arrives five years after San Diego-based Oram Hotels opened an equally ambitious historic hotel in downtown San Diego, which involved transforming a century-old YMCA building that once welcomed millions of service men and women passing through the city.

The original Granger Building opened in 1904 and features a Romanesque architectural style. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

The site of that hotel, on West Broadway, along with the Granger building on Fifth Avenue, were both purchased a decade ago. The complexities involved in preserving the historic integrity of the Granger while reimagining a building that had been built for banks and offices took years before Oram was able to start construction in 2022, said Oram co-founder Kevin Mansour.

A hotel there was our vision from the first day we looked at the Granger building, but the Guild hotel took us five years to get that done, and it was very exhaustive and then COVID hit, Mansour said. So that delayed our plans for the Granger until we were confident things were coming back. There was over five years of design and entitlement, and we started the design 10 years ago.

The lobby of the Granger Hotel. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

The attention to detail and time invested are hard to miss. Part whimsy, part elegance, the hotels design relies on a bold color palette and incorporates high-end finishes and materials, including Italian mosaic marble, imported Moroccan tile, parquet floors, and couches upholstered in rich velvet and a zebra-patterned fabric.

The front desk/lobby bar top is fashioned from a rare Cristallo quartzite known for its translucent character, and the work of local artists is featured throughout the hotel.

Art is a big, big part of the design, Mansour said, pointing to a 50-foot long wall embellished with multiple layers of plaster that he says was designed to create a multidimensional art piece. Our wall of nudes is meant to be provocative and sexy in a respectful way as a tribute to the Gaslamp Quarter, which was kind of seedy in the early 1900s and Prohibition era. We have framed scarves incorporating the art from the lobby, and all the furniture was designed in house and produced in Tijuana.

Reimagined interior of the Granger Hotel that incorporates many oversized plants throughout. (Lori Weisberg / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

And there are clusters of large potted plants everywhere — more than 200 in front of the hotel and inside. Theyre meant to evoke a sense of coziness, says Mansour, while also paying homage to the buildings brief intersection with the birth of the San Diego Zoo.

Dr. Harry Wegeworth, founder of the zoo, was also a physician who set up his medical offices in the Granger Building and would eventually marry Grangers daughter, Rachel. Once the zoo was initially established, Wegeworth was determined to populate the new zoological park with still more animals. So he began networking, collecting and trading animals with other zoos and sheltered some of his new acquisitions in the basement of the Granger Building until they could be moved to their new habitat at the still nascent zoo.

We wanted to give the hotel a jungle vibe given the buildings zoo history, and Dr. Harry was also a collector of plants so wanted to tie that in too, Mansour said.

What sets the new hotel apart from others, says the Oram group, is that its designed as a guest-only hotel, meaning that its only open to overnight guests and their visitors but not to the general public. That means anyone interested in dropping in for a cocktail at the hotel bar would not be permitted.

Many downtown hotels rely financially on locals coming there to dine and drink. Because the Granger does not have a signature restaurant within the hotel, its less reliant on business from non-guests.

We felt there was a void in the market for exclusivity and having an intimate environment for guests coming from out of town, especially in the middle of the Gaslamp Quarter, Mansour explained. We wanted to make it feel more residential so you feel like youre in someones home so you have a place of refuge, and then you can go out and explore the nightlife and enjoy the restaurants and the hustle and bustle of the Gaslamp Quarter outside.

The Granger Hotels cocktail lounge. The wall is displayed with nude art to reflect the vibe of the Gaslamp Quarter in its early years. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

As far as dining within the hotel is concerned, the Granger includes in the price of its rooms a full breakfast buffet in the lobby and an area its calling Fifth and Lox. And debuting this week is the Parlor Room, adjacent to the lobby that is the hotels cocktail lounge, but it also is serving ice cream sundaes.

Longtime San Diego hotelier Robert Rauch said he was unfamiliar with the concept of a guest-only hotel and thought it a little surprising given the desire of most full-service hotels to have locals patronize them.

Its very unusual to exclude locals but I guess they just have a different philosophy, said Rauch, founder of hospitality management firm R.A. Rauch & Associates. It is unique because I dont know of any other hotel that has a bar that would turn you away if you weren’t a hotel guest. You want people to come in and spend money and learn about your property. So I guess theyre trying to differentiate themselves.

A Gaslamp Quarter loft suite in the Granger Hotel. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

The Grangers guestrooms, which were law offices up until a few years ago, line the wide corridors of each floor. The rooms even retain the original 120-year-old doors, down to the mail slots. All were retrofitted for sound and safety. Also present are the original embossed tin ceilings that have been restored. Among the mix of rooms are four larger, corner loft suites on each floor.

As a perk for guests, each floor has a minibar housed within an armoire that is stocked with water, soft drinks, coffee and savory snacks. Everything is included within the guests room rate. Nightly rates start at $395, with suites going for $795.

Kevin Mansour of Oram Hotels gives a tour of the Granger. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

You’ll notice how quiet it is in the middle of the city, Mansour said. We did several months of sound testing to get it right. Were also in north Gaslamp, so its not in the heart of the entertainment district. We believe we’ll be a catalyst for this whole area of north Gaslamp that’s been neglected for many decades.

Still on Oram Hotels to-do list is leasing out three ground-floor spaces totaling 7,000 square feet that could be filled with wellness, dining and retail uses, Mansour said. Oram, he added, will be developing a very high-end bottle shop on the corner of Fifth and Broadway.

The front of the Granger Hotel on Fifth Avenue. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

The Granger will be part of Marriotts Design Hotels, a curated collection of more than 300 independent, design-driven hotels around the world. It will be the first one in San Diego. Mansour said he was told by Marriott that 400 hotels a year apply to be a part of the collection, and less than 5 percent get selected.

Among the hotels unique features is its impressive pedigree. It was the passion project of Ralph Granger, already a millionaire by the time he arrived in San Diego in 1892, having made a fortune on the Last Chance silver mine in Colorado during the 1890s. He eyed downtown San Diego as the location for his next big venture, and hired one of the citys leading architects, William Quayle, to design a five-story office building.

One of the Grangers first tenants was Merchants National Bank, which later morphed into the Bank of Italy, the forerunner of Bank of America. Another well-known occupant was C. Arnholt Smith, a business tycoon and founding owner of the San Diego Padres. He would later fall into disgrace amid the collapse of his National Bank of San Diego and a conviction for grand theft and state income tax evasion. He started his initial business in the Granger and was said to have kept his money in a safe in the basement.

We really love these historic buildings that no one wants to touch, Mansour said. They take years and years to do design and planning and patience and are a lot more expensive, but they’re truly gems in the city. You can’t build something like this today with this kind of attention to detail.

Of the restoration, Mansour added, It’s so difficult, the ability to respect the history but also modernizing it to meet the expectations that guests have today.