DANA POINT : Owner Has Big Plans for Landmark Hotel

Plans are under way to tear down one of the oldest landmarks in the South County, the aging Dana Villa Motel.

The motel’s owner, Robert Folgner, plans a new 180-room motel, to be called the Villa Inn, for the busy corner site next to Doheny State Park and near the Dana Point Harbor entrance. Under the plan, the adjacent Villa Mexican restaurant also will be demolished and replaced with a 5,000-square-foot restaurant.

The old 48-room motel was built sometime in 1929 by S. H. Woodruff, one of the early developers of Dana Point. Woodruff, a successful Los Angeles realtor who had also worked in Baltimore and San Francisco, launched an elaborate real estate promotion in Dana Point in 1930, including plans for a bluff-top hotel, a yacht basin and a subdivision of residential lots that never did materialize.

The new Villa Inn has been designed as a four-story structure with parking for 220 cars, 175 of those underground.

Those plans also call for widening Coast Highway by 10 feet at the intersection with Del Obispo Street.

Architect Lynn Muir described the new motel’s design “as authentic early California Spanish as we can make it.”

“We’re trying to get away from the Cape Cod look that is so prevalent in Dana Point,” he said.

The plans will have to be approved by the city’s Planning Commission, which considers the intersection the gateway to the harbor.

“This is a very important spot for the city,” said Lance Schulte, Dana Point’s senior planner.

Muir estimated that the Planning Commission would review the project by about mid-June.