LPA transforms a historic office building into the boutique Granger Hotel, providing architecture, engineering, interior design and preservation expertise.
By Lori Weisberg
The new 96-room hotel that opened last month in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter is no ordinary lodging destination. Its profusion of jungle-like tropical greenery, a wall filled with framed nudes, and a front desk that doubles as a cocktail bar are singular enough. But a collection of past tenants that included banks, a convicted felon and a menagerie of zoo animals? That’s in a class all its own.
Meet the Granger Hotel, boutique luxury accommodations housed in a 120-year-old Romanesque-style building that required an investment $40.5 million and nearly a decade to pull off. …
The complexities involved in preserving the historic integrity of the Granger while reimagining a building that had been built for banks and offices took years before Oram was able to start construction in 2022, said Oram co-founder Kevin Mansour. …
The attention to detail and time invested are hard to miss. Part whimsy and part elegance, the hotel’s design relies on a bold color palette and incorporates high-end finishes and materials, including Italian mosaic marble, imported Moroccan tile, parquet floors, and couches upholstered in in rich velvet and a zebra-patterned fabric.
The front desk/lobby bar top is fashioned from a rare Cristallo quartzite known for its translucent character, and the work of local artists is featured throughout the hotel.
“Art is a big, big part of the design,” Mansour said, pointing to a 50-foot long wall embellished with multiple layers of plaster that he says was designed to create a multidimensional art piece. “Our wall of nudes is meant to be provocative and sexy in a respectful way as a tribute to the Gaslamp Quarter, which was kind of seedy in the early 1900s and the Prohibition era.” …
The Granger’s guestrooms, which were law offices up until a few years ago, line the wide corridors of each floor. The rooms even retain the original 120-year-old doors, down to the mail slots. All were retrofitted for sound and safety. Also present are the original embossed tin ceilings that have been restored. ,,,
“You’ll notice how quiet it is in the middle of the city,” Mansour said. “We did several months of sound testing to get it right.”
The Granger will be part of Marriott’s Design Hotels, a curated collection of more than 300 independent, design-driven hotels around the world. It will be the first one in San Diego. ..
“We really love these historic buildings that no one wants to touch,” Mansour said. “They take years and years to do design and planning and patience and are a lot more expensive, but they’re truly gems in the city. You can’t build something like this today with this kind of attention to detail.”
Of the restoration, Mansour added, “It’s so difficult, the ability to respect the history but also modernizing it to meet the expectations that guests have today.”
Hero image courtesy of the Granger Hotel
Read the full article in the San Diego Union Tribune.
