Why you should experience The Inn Above Tide in San Francisco, California.
The Inn Above Tide is a waterborne boutique hotel where Downtown Sausalito's maritime character, Bay Region design tradition, artistic independence and intimate relationship with San Francisco Bay converge in a shingled structure projecting directly above the shoreline.
Set along El Portal Street near Bridgeway and just steps from Sausalito Ferry Terminal, the building was constructed in 1962 as an apartment house during a period when substantial new development remained relatively uncommon along Sausalito's downtown waterfront. Its architecture belongs to the Third Bay Region Tradition, the Northern California movement that favored natural materials, expressive structure and close relationships between buildings and landscape, with the city's historic context identifying the contemporary influence of Sea Ranch architects Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker, commonly known as MLTW. The structure became one of only two significant new downtown buildings identified from Sausalito's 1950s and 1960s development period, placing its cedar-shingled waterfront form within the architectural generation that followed the city's postwar transition away from older maritime industries. The result is a hotel where Third Bay Region design, MLTW's architectural influence and the unusual geography of El Portal Street make San Francisco Bay part of the building's fundamental composition.
What you should know about The Inn Above Tide.
The Inn Above Tide is best known for becoming a boutique hotel in 1995 under the McDevitt family, which had constructed the original building more than three decades earlier, beginning a hospitality chapter that developed through repeated interior reinventions while preserving the property's unusually direct relationship with San Francisco Bay. San Francisco design firm Anamar, formerly Delgado Design, completed a substantial renovation in 2011 under principal designer Ana Maria Delgado, redesigning guestrooms and bathrooms through new decorative lighting, wall treatments, floor finishes and a palette specifically developed around the water outside. Delgado's project extended into the lobby, drawing room and hallways while adding a Penthouse Suite, and the property underwent another renovation in 2013, marking three major interior updates within two decades of its conversion into a hotel. Condé Nast Traveler subsequently recognized The Inn Above Tide in its Readers' Choice Awards in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2025, with the property earning a 99.31 score in 2020 and ranking second among Northern California hotels that year.
Owner Kass Green has developed another property-specific chapter through long-term stewardship of The Inn Above Tide, coupling the independent hotel's character with increasingly visible leadership in Sausalito's downtown economy and waterfront community. Green became a cofounder of Downtown Business Improvement District, subsequently served as its president and joined Sausalito's Economic Development Advisory Committee in 2021, connecting stewardship of the hotel with the commercial district immediately surrounding its El Portal Street setting. Sausalito Chamber of Commerce selected Green as its 2025 Spirit of Marin honoree for leadership, civic commitment and environmental innovation, while the Chamber separately recognized The Inn Above Tide as a Legacy Business, giving both owner and property formal recognition within the community where the hotel has operated for three decades. Together, Kass Green, Sausalito Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Business Improvement District and Spirit of Marin extend the McDevitt family's original hotel conversion into a contemporary story of independent ownership and local stewardship, keeping The Inn Above Tide itself at the center of a hospitality lineage rooted specifically in Sausalito.
How to fold The Inn Above Tide into your trip.
The Inn Above Tide works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Sausalito's transformation from working waterfront to one of the Bay Area's most distinctive communities of maritime engineering, unconventional architecture and environmental thought.
Begin at Bay Model Visitor Center, where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed a working hydraulic model of San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta during the 1950s to study a proposal for barriers across the estuary, eventually expanding the installation across 1.5 acres to reproduce the behavior of tides and currents through an immense physical simulation. Continue to Heath Ceramics, founded in Sausalito in 1948 by ceramicist Edith Heath after her work attracted the attention of Gump's buyer Georg Jensen, establishing a pottery whose durable stoneware and architectural tile became defining expressions of California modernism and later entered museum collections including Cooper Hewitt and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Conclude at Sausalito Houseboats, where the postwar waterfront became home to artists, craftspeople and unconventional builders who converted former vessels and improvised floating structures into an evolving community, with the Gates Co-op and Waldo Point Harbor emerging from decades of conflict and negotiation over the shoreline. The progression moves from the Army Corps of Engineers' enormous physical model through Edith Heath's California material culture into the experimental floating architecture of Sausalito's houseboat community, revealing the engineering, craft and waterfront independence surrounding The Inn Above Tide.
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