A Tasteless Confection : Design: Loews Coronado Bay Resort is a $90-million visual mishmash.

The Loews Coronado Bay Resort was the biggest new development completed in Coronado last year--and the biggest disappointment. This misbaked, multilayered wedding cake of tan, green and earth-red stucco is situated along Strand Way, a few miles south of downtown. Frivolously frosted with tile roofs, it may eventually produce big bucks for the Port of San Diego, which owns the 15 acres on which it rests. But the building is doubtful to win the hearts of architecture lovers.

Opened last fall, this $90-million, 440-room anomaly was designed by San Diego architect C.W. Kim, a veteran of large downtown buildings such as the first of two bayfront Marriott Hotel towers and the Emerald Shapery Center high-rise on lower Broadway.

Because of an odd, old lease on the Loews property, the resort was subject to virtually no design review. As part of a 1968 deal with the port, Coronado Landmark Inc., a subsidiary of Signal Landmark Inc., gained the right to develop with minimal design review, and this privilege was passed on to Josef and Lenor Citron, who bought out the lease during the mid-1980s and co-developed the new resort with a group of investors called MKK Associates.

“That lease was very broad and provided for very little design review,” said John Reardon, deputy director of the port’s property department. “It’s an unusual lease to begin with, in that the land that was leased was originally submerged. Crown Isle (the site) was created by dredging. That particular lease provided that Signal could assign all or portions of its lease without district consent. Of course modern district leases require our consent for consign or transfer. That became pretty much standard by 1969, so that was one of the last leases like that.”

Not that the Port might have made much difference. After all, this is the same agency that allowed the San Diego Convention Center and Hyatt Hotel--now being built--to wall off the San Diego Bayfront from public views and access, and the same Port that is now preparing to expand the Convention Center.

Sprawling along a spit of land that juts into San Diego Bay a few miles south of downtown Coronado, the Loews hotel--which is primarily intended for the use of business groups--consists of a circular main building housing the lobby, a 14,000-square-foot grand ballroom and three restaurants. Five wings of hotel rooms radiate from behind the main structure, off a main circulation corridor, like fingers from a hand.

Behind the hotel are five tennis courts and three swimming pools. Thirty-seven detached luxury suites ring the property at water’s edge.

The hotel presents an odd combination of forms and materials, as though Kim couldn’t hit on a unified design direction.

Approached by a long drive that rises into the porte cochere, the entry features a stucco parapet wall that loosely echoes Mission-style parapets, above the sweeping curves of a huge stucco framework that shelters the porte cochere, giving an impersonal, institutional impression more common to a convention center or hospital.

Behind the lobby and main ballroom, the main building features another roof-line parapet wall above groups of square windows set into tall, vertical recessed openings, which are formed like 16th-Century Italian architect Andrea Palladio’s famous curved windows. At the edges of this facade, the stucco is broken into reddish panels presumably meant to resemble the rusticated stone blocks used on Romanesque buildings.

Materials are surprisingly average quality for a place where the Presidential Suite goes for $1,200 a night, luxury waterfront suites for $1,400, and the smallest rooms cost $180. Affordable stucco, aluminum windows and chaotically patterned outdoor concrete surfaces dominate. The lobby boasts nice terra cotta floor tiles and area rugs, but corridors are lined with lime green floral carpeting and white-striped mauve wallpaper that looks like a Victorian sherbet meltdown and that doesn’t go with the exterior’s more modern pretensions.

Kim’s basic planning premise is a solid one, and it works well: Give hotel guests maximum access to views and outdoor spaces. By distributing rooms in wings with landscaped courtyards between them, he has provided enticing garden, bay and pool terrace views.

Aside from views, though, the layout is troublesome. Ground-level parking lots beneath each three-level wing are not well concealed, and cars and building hardware can be seen from many exterior locations on the property. Creeping vines are intended to climb steel frameworks to conceal the edges of the parking lots, but the vines look to be years from completing their task.

Also, with the lobby and its specialty shops at one end of the property, it is a long walk to the rooms on the most distant wings.

At least as annoying as the presence of the hotel is that few locals apparently find fault with it. Tony Pena, Coronado’s director of community development, is satisfied.

“We made it a point to have close contact with port officials encouraging coordination and review of plans,” Pena said. “We had every opportunity to provide comment, and they listened.”

People who live near the Loews resort are surprisingly enthusiastic about the project, which provides an entirely new man-made view to owners of 40 or so waterfront homes priced at $695,000 and up in the Green Turtle neighborhood of the pricey Coronado Cays community. The Citrons are residents of Green Turtle, and their persuasive powers must be impressive.

“I’m sure the overall reaction to the hotel and its appearance is very positive,” said Clifford Hetz, general manager of the Coronado Cays Homeowners Assn.

Added Fran Carrigan of Coronado Cays Realty: “The general opinion is, everybody loves it. The few people that are unhappy about it face the hotel, and have always known it was in the making, so it isn’t a big surprise.”

But have the homes facing the hotel dropped in value because of their altered views?

“Not at all,” Carrigan said. “The new people coming in and looking are very impressed with the view.”

One favorably impressed resident is Jerry Samuels, who owns a condo in the Montego development, next to Green Turtle. His generosity toward the building comes despite the fact that he complained during the hotel’s construction as dust covered his boat and noise disturbed him daily. Samuels and one other Coronado Cays homeowner have since been compensated by the developers for their inconvenience during construction, Hetz said, although he wouldn’t say how much each received.

“We’re delighted with it,” Samuels said. “Before, it was a pile of dirt. I think the architect did a real fine job. It’s not high, it doesn’t block a lot of view. We think it’s a credit to the community. Before it came in, there was nothing but a piece of ground out there with nothing on it. This way, you have a place where anyone who lives in the Cays can go over and eat.”

But architecture buffs who don’t care to dine at one of the hotel’s restaurants may find little appetite for this looming, awkwardly assembled confection.