Stately B&B; Inn Falls Victim to the Times : Hostelry: The 105-year-old Britt House has too few guests to be economically viable, innkeeper says.

The ‘90s have not been kind to the Britt House. San Diego County’s oldest bed-and-breakfast inn plans to close by the end of April. Innkeeper Elizabeth Lord says the quaint “B&B;” at 4th Avenue and Maple Street is just one more victim of a grim recession.

To make matters worse, a guest staying in the Britt House this week--he and his wife were celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary--suffered a heart attack and died several hours later at a local hospital.

“It’s symbolic of the way things have been going around here,” Lord said tearfully.

Lord, 53, has served as innkeeper for three years. She succeeded Duan Martin, who began operating the Britt House as a bed-and-breakfast inn in 1979, and, 13 years later, the place has attained near-legendary status as one of Southern California’s coziest getaways.

For the 92 years before its life as a B&B;, the Britt House, which was built in 1887, served, among other things, as a tea room, a Christian Science reading room, a boarding house, a family home and as medical offices for the surgeon who owned it.

Its current owner is Marilyn Hackim, whose late husband was the doctor. She raised five of her 11 children in the house.

The Britt House is particularly popular among Los Angelenos, who are drawn to its Victorian ambience not only for being within walking distance of the San Diego Zoo and the Old Globe Theatre but for how they’re treated by Lord and her five-person staff.

The Britt House isn’t just a slice from another era, with a striking parlor and a stairway silhouetted by a two-story stained-glass window. It’s a scrumptious breakfast of eggs scrambled with green onions and mushrooms, topped off with home-style biscuits, fresh-squeezed orange juice and gourmet coffee from Europe and Central America.

Or, it’s afternoon tea, served from 4 to 6 p.m., complete with cucumber sandwiches, hummus on pita bread, carrot souffle and such succulent desserts as chocolate pecan and fresh strawberry pie. It’s also airy rooms, painted in burgundy and apricot, or caramel and cream tints, with plenty of lace and frills.

Lord would like to stay in business but says the once-hearty clientele has dwindled to almost nothing--weeknights are especially lonely--and those who end up staying tend to book at the last minute, “which almost never used to happen.”

Many, she said, are deterred by the inn having only one room with a private bath. That’s in the outside cottage, which is detached from the house itself, just beyond the garden and a sprawling camphor tree.

The two-story house, with 5,000 square feet, has four bathrooms, one with twin antique tubs, the rest with showers (and robes). Room rates range from $95 to $110 a night, with more money buying more spaciousness.

Lord says that, once guests arrive, they almost never mind the “bathroom situation”--it’s having to assuage their nervousness on the phone, when taking reservations, that the innkeeper finds increasingly difficult.

Lord believes rooms with toilets and showers would make all the difference in the world but says owner Hackim is reluctant to commit herself to major renovations. Hackim says Lord is right--she has no intention of installing bathrooms.

Lord says that, at this point, her paltry guest list isn’t even paying her lease. In the past, she says, she averaged bookings of about 60%, meaning, at most, a 40% vacancy rate, with weekends almost always booked solid. She’s lucky now if bookings average 20%.

“I need to book 40 rooms out of 70 a week to meet expenses,” she said. “Some weeks, I’m lucky if I book 17 rooms a week.”

Lord says the turning point came early last year--with the Persian Gulf War. She noticed people staying home more, spending less in general but in particular on gasoline. By her reckoning, the change came suddenly, and for her, drastically, and it hasn’t reversed itself.

“Seventy percent of my weekend business is from L.A.,” she said. “People up there would say, ‘Hey, let’s go to the Old Globe, Sea World and the zoo.’ But when the price of gas leaped up, and it suddenly became a choice of coming here or someplace closer, I lost out.”

It isn’t a good time for B&B;’s in general. The Heritage Park Bed & Breakfast Inn in Old Town, which may inherit much of the Britt House trade, was recently in danger of closing until bought by a new owner.

Lord says B&B;’s in Julian and Idyllwild are hurting but should survive, if only because a trip to snow-tinged mountains offers more novelty to Angelenos and other weekend wayfarers than the urban ambience surrounding Balboa Park and the Britt House.

One San Diegan who will mourn the passing of the 105-year-old inn is Mayor Maureen O’Connor.

“I have to tell you, when I heard about it, I was really sad,” O’Connor said. “When I was elected, we had my victory party there (in 1986). It’s such a nice, homey oasis in San Diego, and it gives any visitor such a warm feeling for the personality of San Diego.

“But B&B;’s up and down the state have been hit hard by recession. I don’t care whether it’s San Francisco or San Diego. For a while, B&B;’s were the in thing, and everybody loved them. But, in a recession, such things have a way of changing.”

Duan Martin, the previous innkeeper, who now owns Inn of the Animal Tracks, a B&B; in Santa Fe, N.M., says the recession is bad but isn’t the main problem--it’s the owner of Britt House, Marilyn Hackim.

“I just couldn’t deal with (Hackim) or her attorney,” Martin said by phone from Santa Fe. “She’s the reason Britt House is closing. She’s just impossible. I fought her for 10 years. I fought her over everything.

“She was perfectly within the letter of the law, but we were doing such wonderful things with the house, I thought she could have reciprocated just a little bit. I think her attorney is out to make as much money as possible off the situation.”

Martin found the lease price of more than $5,000 a month too onerous to bear and says, “I put over $200,000 into the house. It became hard just to meet expenses. I told Elizabeth (Lord) for over a year how hard it would be, but people actually fall in love with Britt House.

“They get entranced by it. She thought she could make it work. But, whenever I made my lease payment each month, I called it the Miracle on Maple Street. That’s all that will save it now--a miracle--but who knows, it may happen. Miracles on Maple Street do tend to happen.”

Hackim said she was sorry that the Britt House was “no longer viable” as an inn, but that it wasn’t her fault. She said Martin, the previous innkeeper, “negotiated her own lease. Trying to make me a part of her failure is just ridiculous.”

In regard to not having private bathrooms, Hackim said, “B&B;’s in Europe don’t have that. Having a bathroom down the hall is just taken for granted. Having a private bath is something you get in a hotel or motel.”

Hackim has no plans to sell, saying, “I’m sure it’ll be leased out as something. Exactly what, I’m just not certain.”

Current innkeeper Lord is especially sad about her own fortune. In three short years, the Britt House has become her life and home. In making her rounds one morning this week, she found a note left by a guest.

The guest and her husband had spent their wedding night at the Britt House, and, the woman said, the 10-room inn had brought back a flood of sweet memories. “Just being here makes me feel closer to my husband,” the woman wrote.

Lord, an independent woman who tends to spurn sentimentality, cried over that one.

Other guests have been equally emotional. Maria Vestal, 41, and husband Thomas Vestal, 40, honeymooned at the Britt House in June, 1981, and have come back twice a year every year since, for their anniversary in June and again for Christmas.

The Vestals, who live in West Los Angeles--she’s a preschool teacher, he’s a forklift operator--just finished a stay, however, having told Lord to let them know of any impending closure so they could have at least one more visit.

“What made it so special was the staff’s nurturing hospitality and creativity,” Maria Vestal said. “They created an ambience of love and serenity you really can’t explain. I cried all the way home after the last visit, because the end of the Britt House is, for us, like a death in the family.”