Huntington to Reopen as Rich Blend of Old, New

If Horst Schulze has his way, guests at the new Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel will never hear from hotel employees these three little words:

Hi. Folks. OK.

“We are ladies and gentlemen serving professionally ladies and gentlemen,” Schulze, president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co., told 600 new employees in training at the hotel last week. Such words are not in the vocabulary of ladies and gentlemen, Schulze said, his German accent and elegant dark suit underscoring his message.

Schulze and a team of 40 from the company’s Atlanta corporate headquarters were in Pasadena to oversee final touches before the $100-million, nine-story hotel opens. After five years of work that included a battle with preservationists and the demolition of most of the original hotel, developer Lary Mielke will officially reopen the 85-year-old hotel Monday.

Mielke is counting on the Ritz-Carlton reputation for elegance, refinement and luxury to make the hotel a success. The hotel’s history and place in Pasadena’s social life is another drawing card, he said.

Yet the hotel opening comes in the middle of a recession that has seen hotel occupancy rates drop in the San Gabriel Valley and throughout Southern California. The supply of hotel rooms in Los Angeles County increased by 5% last year while demand increased by only 2%, according to hotel industry surveys. Overall, county occupancy rates dipped to an average of 68%, from 70% last year, the surveys show. Occupancy rates dipped to 59% in the San Gabriel Valley as a whole and 67% in the Pasadena area.

“Los Angeles in general didn’t have a good year in 1990, and it’s not going to be a good year in 1991,” said Maurice Robinson, a partner in the Los Angeles accounting firm of KPMG Peat, Marwick, which tracks the hotel industry. “Ritz-Carlton is developing a brand-new facility in the face of a softening economy.”

Although Pasadena has higher occupancy rates than its surrounding hotel market, the health of that market is based on room rates around $100, Robinson said. The Ritz-Carlton will offer an opening special of $129 until Labor Day. But after that, regular room rates of $145 to $240 will apply, with suites ranging from $350 to $800 daily.

“The question is: What kind of room rate will people pay?” Robinson said. “That’s going to be their challenge.”

Mielke admits that the scale of luxury in the newly built Huntington is something new for Pasadena and could present a risk. “It’s difficult to know how deep the market is,” he said.

He also fears that the recession will impact the hotel, but he added: “I really think that we have a history, an elegant property and tremendous curiosity in the community. . . . All those things will help us through these lean times.”

Pasadena Finance Director Mary Bradley expects the hotel to bring the city at least $1 million a year in room, sales and property taxes.

The elegance being touted at the new hotel is an attempt to reach back to the hotel’s heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.

Built to four stories in 1906 by Civil War Gen. Marshall Clark Wentworth, the hotel opened in 1907 as the Hotel Wentworth. It closed after a disastrous first winter season.

Eight years later, railroad magnate Henry Huntington bought the property and completed a six-story hotel on 75 acres landscaped by the same gardener who designed the gardens of what is now the Huntington Museum and Library--then Henry Huntington’s home.

The hotel became a fashionable winter and, later, year-round resort that attracted notable guests including European aristocracy. Pasadena residents regularly booked the hotel ballrooms and meeting rooms for teas, cotillions, dances and 300 wedding receptions a year.

But as the years passed and owners changed, the hotel lost its luster. Business guests became its mainstay, along with permanent residents who by 1973 rented 35% of the rooms. In 1980, the hotel had so declined that the American Automobile Assn. Tour Book rated it with just two diamonds; top hotels get three.

The final blow came in 1985, when the hotel was closed after the main building was found to be seismically unsafe.

Mielke’s plan to demolish the old building and put up a nine-story replica with modern conveniences met with opposition from Pasadena Heritage and other preservationists, who gathered enough signatures to force a referendum. In 1987, Pasadena voters approved the demolition.

The battle delayed progress on the hotel for a year, Mielke said. But now the duplicated hotel stands ready for comparison. Nearly $20 million in furnishings have been installed, including antique paintings, tapestries, plates and vases.

Two original ballrooms were retained, the Viennese and Georgian rooms. The Georgian has been converted to a dining room with 18-karat gold leaf on the ceiling, Louis XVI chairs, a Chippendale-style breakfront with Gaudy Welsh plates from the mid-19th Century, a 17th-Century Flemish tapestry and four 17th-Century paintings brought from a house in England.

Such settings will make the hotel attractive to the “high-end destination-type visitor” that Pasadena doesn’t have now, said Bruce Ackerman, executive vice president of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce.

The Ritz-Carlton’s competition will not be the city’s three downtown hotels--the Doubletree, Hilton and Holiday Inn--but more exclusive downtown Los Angeles hotels such as the Biltmore, the Four Seasons and Checkers, as well as Beverly Hills hotels such as the Regents-Beverly Wilshire, Ackerman said.

Managers at two of Pasadena’s three downtown hotels agreed.

Mary Ann Woods, sales and marketing director of the Holiday Inn, said rooms there cost from $89 to $120. She characterized her clientele as “middle to upper mid-scale.” Located next to the city’s convention center, the hotel draws many convention guests, she added.

Doubletree’s general manager, Roger Swadish, said the hotel attracts its own business clientele, which regularly uses Doubletree because of the “perceived value” of the hotel, which charges $79 to $119 for rooms. Swadish said the hotel is sold out several days a week.

Only Ly Ping Wu, general manager of Pasadena’s Hilton Hotel, where rooms go from $112 to $145, worried that the Ritz-Carlton might take some of her hotel’s business initially. “People like to try out new products,” Wu said, but added that the business clientele that comes to the Hilton would not necessarily stay at the more resort-oriented Ritz-Carlton.

Indeed, Gayle MacIntyre, a Ritz-Carlton spokeswoman in Atlanta, said the Pasadena hotel is being marketed as a “corporate resort--a business hotel with resort amenities.” She added that Ritz-Carlton hotels appeal to the top executives who did not stop traveling during the Persian Gulf War, unlike those lower on the corporate scale who stay at less-expensive hotels.

The Pasadena hotel will market itself to the Japanese business traveler as well as individual business travelers internationally, added hotel spokeswoman Maria Ramsay. Ritz-Carlton sales offices in London, Honk Kong, Australia and Germany will help find these guests, Ramsay said.

In the meantime, the hotel will offer “weekend getaway” packages, she said.

“I think it will be more things to more people,” Ramsay said. “It will be viewed as a resort to other people and it will be great for the business traveler who wants to stay close to Los Angeles but not in Los Angeles.”

Mielke said the hotel also wants to bring back the local teas, dances and meetings that made the old Huntington a focal point in Pasadena’s social circles. The hotel is counting on making as much as 50% of its annual gross income from such events, which provide only about a third of the income of most hotels, he said.

But the attraction of the hotel for locals and the Ritz-Carlton clientele depends not only on its current elegance but also on its history. For the past six months, hotel ads have featured photos of the original 1914 building. “Come share the luxury and elegance of an era gone by,” they say.

Ramsay said the campaign will continue for at least four months until the buildings and grounds are suitable for new photos.

But it is a campaign that has Claire Bogaard, executive director of Pasadena Heritage, crying foul.

“I think it’s misleading to give people the impression that the building is an old, historical hotel redone, when it is a brand-new building,” she said.

Bogaard’s position is echoed by Arnold Berke, an editor of Preservation News, the newspaper of the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington. Berke said he received a press release from the hotel’s architects that touted the “newly restored” hotel.

“It’s misleading,” Berke said. “Factually speaking, it ain’t a restoration.”

But such distinctions have not concerned most of those who have visited the hotel in its new incarnation. Ann Bussard, a Pasadena Junior League member who attended a league fund-raising dinner last weekend, said she felt as if the old Huntington had been “dusted off and put back.”

“On the outside it looks very much like the original hotel, but on the inside it’s very much new,” Bussard said. “It’s beautiful. I think they did a wonderful job of it.”