Why The Georgian matters.
The Georgian is a glamorous Art Deco hotel where Downtown Santa Monica's oceanfront character meets Depression-era resort architecture, Old Hollywood history and the revival of one of Ocean Avenue's most recognizable buildings.
Set along Ocean Avenue near Santa Monica Boulevard and just steps from Camera Obscura, the hotel occupies the bluff above Santa Monica State Beach between Palisades Park, the Downtown Santa Monica street grid and Santa Monica Pier, with the Pacific extending west toward the Malibu coastline. Its eight-story turquoise facade rises above the lower buildings lining the bluff, combining stepped massing, incised lower walls, small balustraded balconies and dense Art Deco ornament. A stairway lifts the entrance above Ocean Avenue before the interior moves through preserved arches, decorative plasterwork and the ocean-facing terraces. The subterranean Georgian Room creates a second architectural register beneath the bright coastal exterior, returning the building to the supper-club role embedded in its earliest decades. The result is an oceanfront hotel whose vertical silhouette, preserved period fabric and bluff-edge position retain the architectural drama that distinguished it during Santa Monica's interwar resort boom.
What defines The Georgian.
The Georgian is best known for transforming hotelier Rosamond Borde's ambition for an intimate coastal retreat into an Art Deco fixture designed by architect M. Eugene Durfee and opened in 1933. Durfee combined an essentially Art Deco composition with Period Revival elements, differentiating the lower and upper stories, elevating the entrance above street level and adding balustraded balconies to an otherwise strongly geometric facade. The hotel's Red Griffin became a discreet drinking room during Prohibition's final year, with Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Bugsy Siegel among the figures associated with its early social history. World War II altered its clientele as servicemen, aircraft engineers, designers and workers connected with Santa Monica's aircraft industry joined the Hollywood crowd, tying the hotel to the industrial mobilization occurring nearby. Rose Kennedy later spent summers at the property during the 1960s, after remodeling and ownership changes had already begun altering the hotel from its prewar incarnation. Santa Monica designated the building a city landmark in 1995, recognizing Durfee's combination of Art Deco and Period Revival architecture as a significant surviving component of the oceanfront skyline. BLVD Hospitality founders Jon Blanchard and Nicolo Rusconi acquired the property after Blanchard had pursued it for thirteen years, then partnered with ESI Ventures and Fettle on an extensive restoration that closed the hotel in October 2022 and culminated in its April 3, 2023 reopening.
Fettle approached the restoration through surviving architectural fabric, retaining original arches, coves, crown details, iron railings and decorative plaster medallions before rebuilding the interior around the building's late Art Deco character. Eighty-four accommodations divide into 56 rooms and 28 suites, with Fettle using curved custom headboards, bespoke furniture and a palette derived from late-period West Coast Art Deco. The Sunset Bar occupies a horseshoe configuration clad in emerald marble, with restored arches and custom chandeliers carrying the geometric language into the principal public rooms. Downstairs, the Georgian Room returned after six decades with a 1918 ebony Steinway & Sons piano incorporated into a rose-marble-topped bar, joined by leather booths, red-toned walls and a carpet depicting a martini-drinking mermaid. Its current dining counterpart, Sirena, concentrates on coastal Italian cooking, with mozzarella di bufala and heirloom tomatoes, calamari fritti with spicy marinara and other preparations connecting the hotel's Pacific setting with an Italian repertoire. The restored building operates across two deliberately different registers: bright ocean-facing terraces above and the enclosed supper-club environment below, reviving the contrast between public coastal resort and discreet nighttime retreat that shaped The Georgian from its earliest years.
How The Georgian fits.
The Georgian works as the anchor for an outing connecting a nineteenth-century optical attraction with the institution created during Santa Monica's centennial and the surviving remnants of a Hollywood estate designed by one of California's great architects.
Begin at Camera Obscura, whose optical apparatus entered Santa Monica history in 1898 when Mayor Robert F. Jones, nephew of city founder John Percival Jones, installed the attraction on the beach and charged ten cents for a view. After a brief relocation to Westlake Park, the device returned in 1899 and became part of the North Beach Bathhouse before Santa Monica purchased it in 1910 and moved it to Palisades Park. Its rotating turret uses a view and mirror to project the surrounding landscape onto a horizontal disk inside a darkened room. Architect Weldon J. Fulton designed its present Mid-century Modern home in 1955, and the structure joined Palisades Park in receiving local historic designation in 2007. Continue to Santa Monica History Museum, whose institutional ancestry began during the city's 1975 centennial. Ann Funk chaired the Historical Activities Committee responsible for a local-history exhibition at the Civic Auditorium, and the interest generated by that project led to the October 8 founding meeting of the Santa Monica Historical Society inside the public library. Former mayor Clo Hoover, Santa Monica's first woman mayor, became its first president. Collections accumulated for more than a decade before the museum opened in 1988, eventually growing into a substantial body of photographs, objects and memorabilia devoted to the Santa Monica Bay area. Conclude at Annenberg Community Beach House, occupying five oceanfront acres developed by William Randolph Hearst during the 1920s for actress Marion Davies. Julia Morgan shaped an estate centered on a mansion containing more than 100 rooms and an ornate marble pool, where Davies and Hearst entertained Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. Joseph Drown purchased the property in 1947 and converted it into the Oceanhouse hotel and Sand & Sea Club before the principal mansion was demolished in 1956. The Annenberg Foundation later supplied $27.5 million for a public reinvention by Frederick Fisher Partners, Mia Lehrer & Associates and other collaborators, preserving the Marion Davies Guest House and historic pool when the Beach House opened in 2009. The progression moves from an optical attraction created during Santa Monica's emergence as a seaside destination through an institution preserving the city's accumulated history and culminates on a surviving fragment of the Gold Coast where Hollywood wealth, Julia Morgan's architecture and twentieth-century beach culture converged.
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