WEEKEND ESCAPE | COASTAL CALIFORNIA
In Big Sur, Treebones Resort offers simple beauty
The rustic flavor of camping is blended with the comforts of a B&B at Treebones Resort.
Once upon a time, a young couple purchased a hillside parcel on the southern Big Sur coast and dreamed of retiring there someday, turning an abandoned lumberyard into a family-run bed-and-breakfast.
For design inspiration, the couple recruited Cal Poly San Luis Obispo environmental architecture students, who used the B&B as a class project. Their recommendation: The inn should intrude as little as possible on the land. Its buildings, the students said, should be circular, in harmony with offshore winds and in keeping with the round tree trunks that peppered the grassy slopes. Nature, they said, should reign.
The final plan called for oversized yurts, circular tent-like cabins that would provide the rusticity of camping but the comforts of a country inn. They would allow guests to commune with nature. And they would be affordable — at $105 a night plus tax, a sort of poor man's Post Ranch Inn.
The project was saddled with delays — getting permits, financing the couple's dream, sweating through construction. Twenty years passed.
Finally, in November, John and Corinne Handy opened their yurt B&B. It's called the Treebones Resort, and it's my new favorite place on the Central Coast.
I made the trek to Treebones last month with my partner, Todd, arriving around 9 p.m. on a Friday after the 280-mile drive from Los Angeles. One of the Handys' friendly property managers loaded our luggage onto a golf cart for the short ride to Yurt No. 7, on a bluff.
The structure itself was campground-simple: a lattice skeleton made of Douglas fir, plus a round wall and roof made of insulated vinyl and acrylic-coated polyester. Not exactly Fallingwater.
The beauty was in the details: rattan easy chairs and table perfect for playing cards, bedside sconces for easy reading, royal red curtains to draw over the five windows, a deck that looked straight out toward Pacific blue.
We dropped our bags and set out for a walk under a half-moon low on the horizon, glowing yellow and orange. Stars beamed down from space like a million flashlights, guiding us along a trail that passed most of Treebones' 15 other yurts, all dark and seemingly vacant.
We heard voices, though, low chatter mixed with hearty laughter, so we kept on. The source turned out to be not fellow guests but elephant seals, clamoring on distant rocks for their own precious piece of coastal real estate.
Back at No. 7, we spoiled ourselves with a slothful routine: Play cards in the yurt. Listen to waves on our deck. Count shooting stars from a grassy knoll. Repeat.
Thus began our weekend of not-so-roughing it, coddled at a glorified campground where linens, bedding and breakfast were provided and communal bathrooms were more akin to an upscale athletic club (faux-stone tile, adjustable shower heads) than any state campground.
Which, according to John Handy, was the intent. The accommodations here were patterned after yurts at Oregon state parks, with some differences: polished pine floors instead of linoleum, comfortable beds instead of foam bunks and niceties such as washbasins.
The only drawback we encountered was the lack of a full-service restaurant, which sent us to the Whalewatcher Cafe in Gorda and Ragged Point Inn 12 miles south of Treebones for mediocre dinners (one-star food, two-star service, three-star prices).
Overall, though, Treebones delivered a novel ambience, one in contrast with traditional B&Bs intent on re-creating a stereotype of the perfect home.
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