El Cajon Boulevard is hardly a hot spot for San Diego tourism, but when the more than $30 million redo of The Lafayette Hotel made its debut last year, it was an almost instant success — so much so that it’s just been named the best new hotel of the year by Esquire magazine.
The 139-room hotel is hardly new, having been built in 1946, but last year’s renovation has been lauded as a remarkable transformation of a tired property that decades ago had attracted Hollywood’s elite but in recent years had been rarely updated. The San Diego hospitality juggernaut, CH Projects, invested $134 million — and counting — into a meticulous update that also includes seven new restaurants and bars, the last of which will open later this year.
Lafayette Hotel pool area.
(Sandy Huffaker/For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The Lafayette leads Esquire’s top 41 new hotels in North America and Europe, surpassing a Rosewood Resort on Hawaii’s Big Island and Rome’s opulent Bulgari hotel.
To arrive at the final ranking, Esquire said its editors and contributors traveled “thousands of miles to experience new and newly renovated hotels to select the most dynamic properties worth telling a story about.” To make the list, properties needed to transcend “ordinary luxury” in such categories as design, culinary excellence, wellness, cultural vibrancy, and their connection with nature, the magazine said. This is the third year of the Esquire ranking.
“Perhaps no property we visited will change the way you think about a city more than our Hotel of the Year: The Lafayette serves as an ambassador to the richness of San Diego’s culture,” the editors wrote in an article published Tuesday online. “And it does so with a range of nonstop hospitality options that include incredible cocktails, a vibrant pool scene, a twenty-four-hour diner, and even bowling.”
Quixote, a Oaxacan restaurant in the renovated Lafayette Hotel.
(Sandy Huffaker/For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
In addition to the diner and a two-lane bowling alley, there’s an elegant lobby bar, a Oaxacan restaurant fashioned from a decommissioned church in Mexico, a jazz club and a yet to open fine dining restaurant.
CH, known for its large portfolio of popular restaurants — among them, Born & Raised and Ironside — and eclectic bars — the speakeasy Raised by Wolves and False Idol — worked wtih Brooklyn-based Post Company on the design.
“Honestly, this is pretty surreal, especially when you look at many of the hotels on this (Esquire) list that includes incredibly idyllic places in terms of being on a beach or in a larger city,” said Arsalun Tafazoli, co-founder of CH.
“Our whole raison for the project was that while San Diego has some incredible hotels, they’re predicated on the real estate they occupy. So for us to do something culturally intact that’s a reflection of our pocket of subculture and for us to beat out these world-reknowned destinations, it’s pretty special. And this being our first hotel project and being amateur hoteliers makes this sort of validation that much more special.”
The Lafayette Hotel on El Cajon Boulevard.
(Sandy Huffaker/For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Tafazoli said the hotel’s financial performance, including that of its dining and drinking venues, is exceeding the company’s original expectations. He noted that 80 percent of the overnight stays are locals looking to enjoy a staycation, and on weekends it’s totally booked. Occupancy is softer mid-week, he said.
“If there’s a criticism, some people don’t anticipate that level of activation,” he said. “If you’re looking for a calm thing, it can be a pretty over-stimulating environment.”
Esquire’s impression of the Lafayette mimics in many ways Tafazoli’s original aspiration when he set out to take on a project that he said other hotel developers eschewed because of its location away from San Diego’s tourism hubs.
“Unlike most hotels, the Lafayette does not feel as if it were made by committee,” Esquire wrote. “No corporate board or focus group is going to tell you it’s a good idea to reassemble an abandoned Mexican church for the interior of an on-site Mexican restaurant or to build a two-lane bowling alley in your basement bar in homage to the final scene in ‘There Will Be Blood.’ It’s these outlandish ideas that have transformed a property … into a prime example of what a hotel can be when it thinks of hospitality not as giving the guests what they think they want but as showing them what’s pretty damn cool.”
Still to come at the hotel is Le Horse, an upscale dining room that is expected to have some tableside preparations like sliced prime rib, and a spa concept that is supposed to reflect a confluence of Russian, Roman and Turkish baths.
