Hotel to Use Design by Frank Lloyd Wright

A good design needn’t go to waste. A hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1947 to be built in the Hollywood Hills but never constructed will become the centerpiece of a $100-million golf resort and conference center to be built at Santa Fe, N. M.

The resort will feature a 7,000-yard golf course, a 300-seat auditorium, a 6,000-square-foot conference center, performing arts facilities and the expected resort amenities. It will be situated on 836 acres in the roughlands near the Santa Fe Opera, about five miles north of the city.

Wright was commissioned in 1947 by A&P; heir Huntington Hartford III to design a hotel for the Hollywood Hills. It was never built and the design reverted first to Wright and then to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation of Scottsdale, Ariz., from whom it was obtained by William C. Kueffer, vice president of the Castillo Corp. of New Mexico, which will develop the resort.

According to Charles Montooth, foundation architect, “The hotel is designed with banks of rooms on broad terraces following the contours of the hills, much like an Indian pueblo with its terraced apartments.”

The Castillo Corp. said it had found a site on the resort property that matches the land contours and slopes that Wright and Hartford originally had in mind. No development schedule was announced.