New Silo Hotel Doesn’t Go Against the Grain
Many who saw the construction plans thought the developers were full of beans.
“Even after we had bank financing and city permits, people said it couldn’t be done,” recalled Robert B. Smith, one of the general partners in a development group that has converted 32 lima bean and barley silos in Irvine into a 148-room La Quinta Inn.
The $7-million hotel conversion--which required the use of diamond saw blades to carve hallways, doorways and windows through 6-inch-thick concrete and special furnishings to fit rooms fashioned out of the hexagon-shaped silos--is part of a larger effort to preserve the fast-disappearing historical architecture and farming atmosphere of East Irvine.
Final touches are being put on the hotel--which has been quietly renting some rooms to the public since the first of the year--for its grand opening next Thursday.
It is the 12th hotel that San Antonio-based La Quinta Motor Inns has built in California, the sixth in the past 18 months. La Quinta, which specializes in mid-price accommodations for business clientele, has four more hotels under construction in the state, which it has targeted for the lion’s share of its national expansion.
Sam Barshop, La Quinta’s chairman and chief executive officer, said that his partners in the joint venture in East Irvine--the principals of Irvine-based J. Ray Construction Co., the Irvine Co. and individuals including Smith--”were looking for someone with enough nerve to do it.”
“Other hotel companies turned it down. They said it couldn’t be done or they didn’t want the risk of doing it,” Smith said. “It was really a very challenging development.”
Located on Sand Canyon Avenue just off the Santa Ana Freeway, the four-story hotel still has the outward appearance of an old granary, including jutting concrete walls topped by a corrugated metal roof.
It overlooks an asparagus field and stretches along the Santa Fe Railroad tracks at a crossing where bells jangle to stop traffic as Amtrak trains whiz by.
On weekdays, the hotel is expected to cater primarily to business people. Although it is located in an area dominated by agriculture, the hotel’s owners expect it to flourish as fields of row crops and orange groves are bulldozed for expansion of the Irvine Co.’s nearby Spectrum office and industrial park.
David Kinkade, a hotel specialist with the accounting firm of Laventhol & Horwath, predicted that the new inn “is going to sell, although it may take a little time for its occupancy to develop.”
He said that the standard room rates at the hotel--which range from $54 to $66 in the granary and $49 to $61 in the traditionally styled annex--will be especially attractive in Orange County, which recently has been deluged with fancier and much higher-priced hotels.
The developers used “high-tech” architecture in the granary-to-hotel conversion, leaving the new air-conditioning equipment and conduits exposed and installing low-hanging industrial-style lamps and other fixtures.
In an accommodation to hotel guests, a swimming pool and spa have been built on what was formerly a loading dock and a chute that once carried lima beans up to the 35-foot-high silos has been enclosed and turned into an elevator shaft.
But even inside the hotel, much of the flavor of the 1947-vintage granary remains. In one of the lobbies, a guest can see the old factory’s master electric switch panel and an open lift that the granary workers used. And guest rooms in the granary are decorated with tinted photographs of ranch hands and mule-drawn wagons.
Promotors of the granary restoration intend to make hay out of the Irvine Ranch’s historic association with the lima bean--which they say predates and outshines that of the C.J. Segerstrom family, Costa Mesa’s preeminent office building and shopping center developers.
The Segerstrom family has claimed that it was once “the nation’s largest producer” of limas, cultivating 22,000 acres in 1954. However, the promoters of the new La Quinta contend that James Irvine II planted the first lima beans in Orange County in the 1890s and soon had more than 22,000 acres in beans.
Orange County historian Jim Sleeper supports the Irvine Ranch advocates. “In sheer acreage, no one could top the Irvine Ranch” for lima production, he said. In 1916, he said, the ranch had planted 54 square miles of limas.
Conversion of the granary is the first step in a plan to preserve and put back into commercial use the major historic buildings in East Irvine, which was founded in 1887 as the center for processing and shipping row crops grown on the Irvine Ranch.
The Sand Canyon Historical Partners, which acquired six acres from the Irvine Co. in late 1985 by paying $1 million and giving the company a 25% partnership interest, also plans to restore the cavernous, 92-year-old warehouse next to the granary. Smith said the partnership is interviewing operators of restaurants and other enterprises who may want to occupy the 400-foot-long warehouse or the old post office, general store, farm workers’ bungalow and clapboard hotel that have been moved next to the La Quinta Inn and also have been slated for restoration.
On Tuesday a 160-seat Knowlwood restaurant will open next to the former bean silos in a much-spruced-up blacksmith shop built in 1913.
