Celebrating Quirky Kitsch

Esther Lopez slips into the men’s room, stares a moment and quickly snaps a picture. She bursts out again, laughing.

“Oh, it’s wonderful--so unique,” she says. “Everybody kept talking about it. I had to go in there and see.”

Her husband, Vincent, emerges right after her, grinning. It is no place for privacy, he says. “There are more women in there than men.”

Sure enough, several more women come filing out, like tourists exiting the Carlsbad Caverns. Except here, the scenery consists of a single rock formation: an 8-foot waterfall, set in a verdant milieu of green wall tile and mud-brown floors.

The dual-drain, fully flushing urinal is arguably the most famous in all of California. It is also one of the quirkiest of many quirky features in the ornate, hot-pink Madonna Inn, a stopover on U.S. 101 on the south end of San Luis Obispo.

American highway culture has produced any number of oddities through the years--motels shaped like tepees, theme diners with garish neon signs, souvenir shacks squatting beneath oversized statues of cowboys, longhorn steers and dinosaurs. Especially in the West, where the monotony of the open road can extend hundreds of miles at a time, these tiny islands of capitalism subsist by offering something so wacky, so different, that you are enticed to pull over for an hour or overnight and spend a few bucks.

The Madonna Inn is a landmark so renowned for gaudiness that couples seek it out for honeymoons and romantic getaways. Its 110 suites, priced at up to $320 a night, come in vivid pinks, reds, greens and blues. Every room is different and individually named. Some have massive stone hearths and floral chandeliers.

In the Caveman Room, for example, you can sleep under a rock ceiling and shower under a waterfall. Flip a couple of light switches in the Old Mill Room and you can watch dancing Bavarian figurines while water trickles down a rock conduit, powering a 3-foot mill wheel.

Barbara Kegeles had heard about the inn while growing up in Hamden, Conn. Now she and her husband, Howard, are booked into the all-green Ren Room, one of three adjoining suites named Ren, Dez and Vous. Their friends Dick and Marsha Smith are across the hall in the all-blue Vous suite, sleeping on a round bed under a vaulted ceiling and glass-beaded chandelier.

For Marsha, it’s a second visit. She stayed here on her honeymoon after a previous marriage, in 1971.

“The first time was so exciting,” Marsha says. “It’s like Disneyland.”

No one knows exactly how to describe the architecture, not even Alex Madonna, the 82-year-old founder, who opened the first dozen rooms on Christmas Eve in 1958. Madonna, a developer responsible for building many of the state’s highways, says he barely graduated from high school and more or less sketched out his plans for the inn on paper napkins.

“We tried an architect when we first started--tried several of them,” he says. “Architects are pretty much into doing the same things over and over. I don’t like building in straight lines. I like building in curves.”

The main building, with a coffee shop and formal dining room, has high cupolas, a flagpole with a pink ball on top, and a steep shake roof. The pink trim suggests a Tudor influence, Madonna’s way of representing “the Old World”--which, when the inn was built, he had never seen.

Rock fountains are bordered with gardens of marigolds, daisies and wildflowers. There are extensive leaded-glass windows and hand-carved balustrades. A 28-foot fake gold tree, fabricated from leftover electrical conduit, fans out over the circular pink booths of the dining room. The tree is lush with plastic wisteria blossoms, white accent lights and electric candles. Fiber-optic poinsettias add to the visual bombardment.

Adjoining that room is a gargantuan fireplace made of rocks weighing up to 200 tons apiece. Madonna likes to show off the fossilized backbone of a dinosaur poking out from one great boulder.

“I dug these rocks out myself,” he says, “because I knew what I wanted.”

He is a businessman of uncommon sagacity, still actively involved in planning a proposed 100-room expansion. The inn’s baubles and mementos distract the eye from the underlying design elements that Madonna has incorporated: the efficient circular floor spaces that enable a waitress to serve the most people in the least time, heavy tabletops that deaden the noise of forks and plates in the dining area.

His wife, Phyllis, shared much of the design work. She came up with the original look for the women’s restroom downstairs in the wine cellar. She gave the ladies’ room crystal chandeliers, tufted-leather doors, cherub faucet handles and stage lights around the mirrors. That inspired Alex to come up with his waterfall. “He was going to outdo me,” she says, smiling. “He’s got to do better than me.”

Dave Muntean, who tends the pink, undulating bar just above the wine cellar, says much of the talk over cocktails is about the pink color scheme and that waterfall. “That’s the No. 1 thing they ask me,” he says. “ ‘Where’s this restroom that’s supposed to be world-famous?’ ”

Earl and Kress Davis, a retired couple stopping at the inn on a trip to Solvang and Hearst Castle, manage to find the thing, and Earl is duly impressed.

“It’s worth the trip,” he declares.

Kress, however, is a little embarrassed about peeking inside and lingers for a while outside the door. Finally, she gives up and retreats back upstairs.

She has never been in a men’s room in all her 68 years--and she is not going to start now.