A little more than a year after unveiling the $31 million restoration of the Lafayette Hotel, San Diegos CH Projects is tackling another ambitious hospitality project — a 31-room luxury hotel in Coronado, complete with an outdoor jungle and lagoon.
Located across the street from the iconic Hotel Del Coronado, the new Baby Grand hotel will take the place of La Avenida Inn, a tired, 1950s-era motel that has been torn down. A two-story hotel, which is currently under construction, will replace the motel and include multiple restaurants and bars, both indoors and outdoors.
A key part of the maximalist design, as CH describes it, is the former parking lot in front of the hotel that will be transformed into a jungle-like setting decorated with large palm trees, wild flora and climbing flowering vines, along with a two-story waterfall that cascades into a beach lagoon.
Gone is the inns pool, and to compensate for the loss of the parking lot, CH was able to work out a deal to use a neighboring banks lot for valet parking.
This had been a classic Howard Johnson design with the large asphalt parking lot and pool, sort of remnants of the 60s and early 70s when car travel was the primary mode for vacations, said CH co-founder Arsalun Tafazoli. It’s a great location that was optimized more for cars, and it felt like a a special opportunity to take something dated and make it more humanistic.
The hotels look, which Tafazoli characterizes as aristocratic, couldnt be more different from its predecessor. It will employ unexpected surprises and over-the-top design features that include lobby walls lined in vintage hand-painted tapestries, a draped ceiling, and an oversized Murano light fixture. The flooring will be an elaborate mosaic of tiled fish and sea creatures, set off by chrome and mirrored walls, crushed velvet banquettes, and clamshell chairs.
Guestrooms will have beds with a huge pearlescent clamshell headboard and wallpaper showing off former imagined civilizations. And not unlike the Lafayette Hotel, each room will be furnished with an oversized, mirrored mini bar.
Rendering of one of the newly designed guestrooms planned for the Baby Grand hotel in Coronado. (The Post Company)
Another highlight of the hotel — reminiscent of the hidden bars in some of CHs hospitality venues — will be a corner sculpture that requires only a tap of the hand to gain entry into Fallen Empire, a planned champagne, caviar and oyster bar.
We wanted it to feel like really aristocratic ruins, Tafazoli said. The property has custom sculptures and it makes you feel like you came upon a site where there is the weight of aristocracy. We operate on a core premise that life is hard, and the point of great art, whether it’s this or paintings or writing, is to help you forget. So we try to do that by doing these immersive environments where you lose your sense of time and place. Its unexpected for sure.
Tafazoli calls his project accessible luxury, with room rates expected to range from $300 to $400 a night. While not inexpensive, the rates are considerably lower than those at the neighboring Hotel Del.
CH Projects has long been known for its robust and diverse portfolio of restaurants, from the Born & Raised steakhouse in Little Italy to its most recent dining venue, Leila, a Middle Eastern restaurant. But more recently, the hospitality company is increasingly venturing into hotels. A third project, a 60-room hotel in Little Italy, is currently in the design stage, which should be complete in about three to four months, Tafazoli said.
Given the companys focus on dining, the new hotel will include multiple dining and drinking venues, among them Nighthawk, which will be a Greek-Mediterranean fusion restaurant featuring a custom-built hearth oven. Also planned is a still unnamed omakase venue and a lobby cafe that will serve coffee drinks and baked goods.
What separates the Coronado project from other CH venues is its outside the urban core where most of the companys restaurants — and the Lafayette — are located.
Four years in the making, the Baby Grand came to fruition when the owners of the Avenida property reached out to CH, Tafazoli said. His firm doesnt own the hotel site but last year signed a 40-year ground lease. Rooms there continued to be available to guests until August, after which construction started on the new hotel.
I have a few friends that live on the island, and our offices are downtown, just six minutes away but when you get off that bridge, there’s a whole new energy, the dichotomy of being so close and yet feeling so far. Tafazoli said. So I was very enamored with that.