Hotel del Coronado
— — the white hotel the sea forgot to take.
Not only on a wall.
“The white Victorian hotel on the long Coronado strand, across the bay from downtown San Diego. Opened in 1888 as one of the last great wooden seaside resorts in the country, with red-turreted roofs facing the Pacific and a beach that runs south toward the Mexican border. L. Frank Baum took winters here and is said to have drawn the chandeliers in the dining room. Wilder filmed Some Like It Hot on the same sand. The afternoon light goes pink on the white wood for about an hour before sunset, and the bartender at the Babcock & Story still pours an old fashioned the long way.
Hotel del Coronado, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Hotel del Coronado sits on the Pacific side of the Coronado peninsula, across San Diego Bay from downtown San Diego. Construction took eleven months, beginning in 1887, and the hotel opened on February 19, 1888 as one of the largest wooden buildings in the United States. Designed by the brothers James and Merritt Reid of San Francisco in a Queen Anne and Shingle style, the resort occupies a 28-acre site at 1500 Orange Avenue. The peninsula is connected to mainland San Diego by the Coronado Bridge, completed in 1969, and to Imperial Beach by the seven-mile Silver Strand. The hotel was designated a National Historic Landmark on April 19, 1977, and remains in continuous operation under Hilton's Curio Collection.
The hotel is built almost entirely of wood, including the red-shingled turrets that face the Pacific. Construction was led by the Reid brothers of San Francisco, with lumber and labour shipped down by rail and rough-milled on site over eleven months in 1887. The Crown Room, the original main dining hall, has a curved sugar-pine ceiling joined with wooden pegs. L. Frank Baum spent several winters at the hotel between 1904 and 1910 and is credited locally with designing the crown-shaped chandeliers that still hang there. A multi-year restoration of the original Victorian Building was completed in 2022, returning the white clapboard and shingle to its 1888 silhouette.
The hotel has been in continuous operation since February 1888 and welcomes day visitors on the public grounds, the beach, and the lobby. It is reached from downtown San Diego by the Coronado Bridge, about ten minutes by car, or by the foot ferry from the Broadway Pier to the Coronado Ferry Landing. The resort has 757 guest rooms across the historic Victorian Building and several adjacent towers, with rates highest between June and August and during the December holidays. Coronado Beach, the wide sand in front of the hotel, was ranked the best beach in the United States by Stephen Leatherman's annual list in 2012. Guided historic tours run several times each week and depart from the lobby.