The newest hotel in the Ojai center, which is also the oldest, is located along Ojai Avenue as a rancher with its best rope tie and leather vest.
This property, now known as Hotel El Roble, has been a fixed element on the main street of Ojai for more than a century, from party to multiple civic dramas, a condemnation for fraud, repeated closures and four decades of physical conditioning retreats. Now, after years of negotiation and restoration, a new team of owners has restructured the place to evoke the old California, celebrate the wild side of the Ojai Valley and attract Angels who seek to escape the city.
“There is a hitch post outside, next to the bicycle portal,” said Hotel Jeremy McBride, pointing out that horse visits are not out of discussion.
The Hotel El Roble in Ojai has two turtles on its land.
(Hotel El Roble)
In a city that has little time in the supply of accommodation, the oak stands out for its size, its place in local history and the way it uses that story on its walls. Ah, and the two giant turtles back.
It rose in 1919, a mixture of Spanish revival and Renaissance styles of the California mission. Its 2 acres include 39 rooms, 11 bungalows, a pool, a space for events, a dinner restaurant (The Condor Bar) and a breakfast and lunch restaurant (the kitchen). He reopened this summer with night rates of $ 455 and more.
“There are so many fashion design hotels, and we certainly didn't want to do that,” said Eric Goode, the most long data partner with the area. “Ojai is rustic and horse. It's not Montecito.”
The entrance of the hotel is framed by an arc that echoes those of the Arcade building in the center of Ojai. Most bungalows have Kiva style chimneys. In the breakfast and kitchen lunch room, the bar wall is a stack of bottles of mortnted colors together with concrete like a bottles house of the ghost city.
The centerpiece of the lobby is an stacked stone fireplace. The walls have a surround mural full of flora and fauna of the Ojai Valley.
Lobby at the El Roblel Hotel.
(Hotel El Roble)
It seems that the room goes back to a century. But the fireplace is new, rebuilt to resemble the old photos. So is the mural, painted by the artist Stefano Castronovo last year.
Although Goode, 67, is better known elsewhere as an entrepreneur and creator of documentaries, spent a part of his childhood in the Ojai Valley. While his father taught at the Thacher school, said Goode, he was “catching lizards and sldeline snakes and placing them in my lunchbox.”
Later, Goode created the nightclub/art gallery of the New York area in the 1980s; He took property papers in several hotels and restaurants, including the New York Bowery hotel; and co -founded the non -profit turtle conservancy with Maurice Rodrigues. Later, Goode produced and directed the documentary series “Tiger King” (2020) and “Chimp Crazy” (2024).
For about 35 years, said Goode, has maintained a home in Ojai and has returned frequently. However, for most of the time, Goode said: “I never thought I would do a business here.” The key, he said, was to find a historical property whose reopening might seem more like a rebirth than an interruption of local culture.
When Ojai and El Roble were born
The Hotel El Roble de Ojai includes a pool area bounded by Bougainvillea.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
The oak was born when Modern Ojai was taking shape between 1917 and 1920. That was when the city was called Nordhoff to Ojai and local leader Ed Libbey hired the architects Richard Requa and Frank Mead to effectively remodel the city after a fire.
They designed the long playground of the city along Ojai Avenue; your post office and tower of your signature; a church that became the Ojai Valley Museum; and the oak, all elaborated with characteristics of colonial reactivation and Spanish mission.
While Ojai's reputation spread like a small sophisticated town with a folded and spectacular spiritual environment, the robber prosperly, hesitated, became called Robles, added a bar, added a pool and added Bungalows. He also added a neon sign and then subtracted it, eventually abandoning much of its original design when the owners and managers came and came.
On one account, the first hotel managers included a Mr. Canfield in Santa Bárbara, followed by Mr. Cromwell of San Francisco, who committed suicide. Frank Keenan, a former Chicago councilor who bought the hotel in 1952 and in 1957 was sentenced in Illinois for evasion of the Federal Income Tax.
“We hope not to follow your steps,” said Goode.
The hotel entered a different era in 1977, when Fitness businesswoman Sheila Cluff refused as a health -oriented retreat, through leadership to her daughter, Cathy Cluff. The OAKs closed in 2017 after suffering smoke damage in Thomas's fire, and when the Cluff family put the property for sale, the new owners intervened.
New rooms, new art, itinerant reptiles
Guest room at the El Roblel Hotel.
(Hotel El Roble)
No one will confuse El Roble with a fitness retreat now. Although their pool and gym is likely to be used a lot, the new owners are clearly focused on comfort, style and history.
In addition to Goode and McBride, who have experience as an entrepreneur and filmmaker, the partners include the designer Ramin Shamshiri and the restorer Warner Ebbink (which co -owner of the Little Dom restaurants in the happy and carpentry and bar Lou in Montecito).
The sale closed in September 2019. Then the pandemic arrived. He took six years of design, allowed negotiations with the city, restoration and construction before the hotel reopened under its original name.
Because the OAKs was executed as a mostly private physical conditioning withdrawal, McBride said, the restart of the hotel means that “it is really open to the community for the first time in 50 years.”
The bar at the La Cocina restaurant at the El Roblel Hotel.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
His restaurant for dinner, The Condor Bar, led by executive chef Brandon Boudet, opened on July 17, serving “California Mexicana” kitchen and using a wood grill in the style of Santa María. The work continues in the eight rooms in the Hotel Sycamore building, scheduled to open in mid -September.
On the other side of Ventura Street from the hotel, the new owners have also bought a property that once housed the World University (which closed in 2017). His plan still needs the approval of the city, but the hotel owners have said that their goal is to open a 9,000 square feet spa and a well -being center “to complement the hotel” in the next 18 to 24 months.
The general idea, McBride said, is that the space of oak feels “not like a new and elegant hotel, but something that has always been here.”
Public areas and rooms are full of personalized and old furniture and more than 1,000 art articles, many of them from California auctioneers in Casitas Springs and the first antiques of California in Oxnard. The walls of the restaurant are full of condor images and artifacts, “as if you were having dinner at your favorite Natural History Museum,” McBride said.
In the walled garden next to the hotel's bungalows, two giant turtles of Aldabra, Abra and Cadabra, crawl between the sun and the shadow. (They are borrowed by Turtle Conservancy. For $ 100 per adult, Roble guests can register for a journey through the Conservancy Ojai property, which includes around 500 turtles and turtles).
The hotel website indicates that property and its chimneys, balconies and pool without lifeguard are “designed for adults” and that “we discourage children [as overnight guests] for security reasons. “Dogs under 60 pounds are welcome (with a $ 250 rate).
The oak rates hint in the shortage of accommodation in Ojai, which has attracted many figures in the entertainment industry, but protects its character from the small city aggressively.
Two of the partners behind the Hotel El Roble de Ojai are Jeremy McBride and Eric Goode.
(Dave Allocca / Starpix for HBO)
The city has around 7,600 residents and a dozen hotels. Increases one of the highest hotel in the state's tax rates (15%), prohibits short -term vacation rentals and prohibits chain businesses with five or more locations. The largest hotel in the city is the Ojai Valley Inn of 303 rooms, which has its own golf course and summer rates that begin around $ 780.
In 2022, the school board rejected a plan to convert a school district site into a 200 -room hotel. Last year, the winning campaign of Mayor Andy Gilman asked for an open civil speech, but warned that “Our overdependence on tourism.”
The parking lot could be the most controversial part of the Renaissance of Roble. To leave space for other elements, the new owners obtained permission to take out the public parking at the hotel, ensure parking outside the site and require guests to use the Valet service ($ 50 nightlife). This satisfied city officials, but not some neighbors.
“Only another disgusting exhibition of the $$$$. Without real parking,” complained an Ojai resident on Facebook.
McBride said that these debates can be the protective attitude of Ojai residents that has helped maintain the identity of the city in place.
“This place is still very special,” he said. “There is a reason why the people who are here want to preserve it.”
