Asilomar: A Place to Take a Meeting Away From It All

Each autumn, art teacher Pat Abraham and a group of her students from Roseville Art Center in a Sacramento suburb come here for a week “to get away from it all” and devote their energies exclusively to painting.

The setting is the 76-year-old Asilomar Conference Center, a unit of the State Park System in a secluded 105-acre pine forest overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the tip of Monterey Peninsula.

“This is a wonderful, peaceful, quiet place. We paint from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. with time out for meals. We paint what’s here, tide pools, Monterey pines, dunes, the sea,” said Abraham, who was at Asilomar with eight students, all homemakers and businesswomen.

Teachers come for meetings, as do scientists, politicians, engineers, lawyers, doctors, members of all types of organizations, including the International Assn. of Oz.

This year, more than 1,500 groups--some small, such as Pat Abraham’s art class, some with as many as 850 people--will have held meetings at Asilomar Conference Center. Some groups spend only a day, some several days, some an entire week. More than 200,000 group members have stayed here so far in 1989.

Groups choosing Asilomar as a meeting place come from as far as Hong Kong, Japan, Great Britain, Germany and Australia. The majority--65% of the groups--come from California. Religious groups account for 30% to 35%, education and government, each 20%, and about 10% are from companies and corporations.

One obvious attraction is the low cost: $38-a-day per person, including three excellent meals. Some groups book three years in advance to be sure to get a particular time. One religious group has been coming every year for 71 years. Repeat business is 85%.

Asilomar has been owned since 1956 by the State Parks and Recreation Department and operated ever since by a nonprofit corporation that pours all earnings back into new construction, renovation of buildings and park-like grounds. The conference center area is dotted with 58 structures.

In one corner of the scenic grounds is the William Penn Mott Jr. Training Center, serving as an academy for state park rangers and as an educational facility for other parks department employees.

“The mission of Asilomar since its establishment by the YWCA in 1913 and continuing to the present is to provide an inexpensive place for people to meet and confer,” explained Don Elisha, 61, general manager of Asilomar the last 12 years.

In its serene, park-like setting, Asilomar offers the visitor a distinctive if Spartan experience: comfortable but simple guest rooms; no telephones or television in the guest lodges; no room service; no cocktail lounges, and no liquor served at meals.

Many guest rooms have fireplaces, as do all the meeting rooms. Conference room chairs are designed for comfort, thick padding on seats, raised backs to endure long hours in meetings.

“Meetings are held 12 months of the year,” Elisha said. “We can sleep as many as 1,000 a night in lodges on the grounds. We have 90% year-round occupancy. We employ 250 with a payroll of $4 million annually. Our sales run about $10 million a year.”

A third-generation hotelier, Elisha is also president of the 15,000-member California Hotel-Motel Assn., the largest association of its kind in America.

Guest rooms are nestled in the pines in two-story rustic lodges, each close to meeting rooms. Lodges and meeting rooms have quaint nautical names such as Nautilus, Triton, Seascape, Whitecaps, Marlin, Dolphin, Surf and Sand, Spindrift.

It was philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst (1842-1919), mother of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who first suggested the conference center. She was a patron of the YWCA and donated 30 acres to the YWCA to start Asilomar in 1913.

The name Asilomar is a combination of Indian and Spanish and means refuge by the sea.

California architect Julia Morgan, the first woman admitted to Ecole des Beaux-Arts architectural school in Paris, designed the first three buildings at Asilomar. She was the architect of the Herald Examiner building in Los Angeles, Hearst Castle, a number of buildings at UC Berkeley, and more than 700 buildings throughout the state.

The Julia Morgan Lodges, constructed of natural stone, redwood walls, exposed timbers and massive fireplaces at Asilomar, have been renovated and restored. Many of the lodges and meeting rooms are of relative recent construction and of contemporary architecture.

Over the years, Asilomar’s 50 acres of white sand dunes on the beach eroded badly, due to years of overgrazing, brush-clearing and logging. For the last eight years, a concentrated effort has been made to restore the dunes to what they were like before man’s impact.

The dunes have been replanted with original flora. Two winding boardwalks across the dunes provide visitors an opportunity to appreciate the beauty of the conference center’s beachfront and soak up the atmosphere of a California tradition.