Inn of the Environmentally Correct : Big Sur’s First New Resort in Two Decades Blends With Its Surroundings--but at a Price

At 7 a.m. a few Tuesdays ago, I awoke 1,100 feet above the Pacific, 10 feet above the Earth, surrounded by heavy redwoods and encased in a triangular module of glass, African wood and Indian slate. Gurgling frogs sounded through the trees. The epic and the unlikely lay on every side. I could have called for help, or pinched myself, or climbed onto the roof and waited for the waters to rise and engulf the just and unjust alike.

Instead I did the logical thing. I nudged my spouse, dressed, descended the stairs and wandered down the gravel path for coffee, pastries and a bowlful of custom-made granola, greeted by waiters in fashions by Alexander Julian. If you sleep at the Post Ranch Inn, the first resort to open in Big Sur since 1975, that’s the way your waking goes.

Now, if Pacific slopes, tall redwoods and a place to hang your lantern are enough, you can have them for less than $20 a night in the state parks and campgrounds that line the coastal highway here. You wake with the forest canopy overhead, and if you follow all the rules, you can take comfort in the fact that you’re doing little damage to the marvelous geography on all sides.

If you want an actual roof over your head, you can get one for less than $80 nightly at several rustic hotels nearby. You’ll still hear forest noises, maybe surprise some deer browsing in a nearby meadow, perhaps come upon a coyote in the parking lot.

But that’s not enough for everybody--or at least, that’s what developers Myles Williams, Michael Freed, their partners and their banker are presuming. Together, they have built the Post Ranch Inn on an oceanfront bluff long held by a Big Sur pioneer family, gambling that a select and solvent few travelers to Big Sur will pay big for something extra, something environmentally correct, something involving glass, African wood and Indian slate.

On May 1, after a month of offering rooms at discount rates, Williams, Freed and company celebrated their grand opening. The rooms are named for local pioneers and shaped like spaceships. The proprietors ask $245-$450 nightly, rates that rival those of the regal Ventana resort across the road. In return, the Post Ranch Inn offers exclusivity--30 units on 98 acres--and a natural environment that the builders say was changed as little as possible.

“We’re not developers,” Williams likes to say. “This is our only hotel. . . . The land was zoned ‘visitor-serving,’ so someone was going to build a hotel here.”

Williams and Freed decided it might as well be them, and eight years ago made a handshake agreement with Bill Post, whose family has held the property since the middle of the 19th Century.

“The first thing was to be environmental,” said Williams, a former New Christy Minstrels singer who operates a Carmel senior residential facility and has lived in Monterey County for 20 years.

The development company paid about $1 million for the 98 acres, Williams said, and has invested another $7 million since then, having secured a key loan shortly before the recession hit. If the inn averages 50% occupancy in its first year, he estimated, it will make money.

“The whole karma here, the whole aura, has been very high,” said Williams. Asked about the construction process, he described the laborers listening to Chopin on their boomboxes, the welders preferring Bach.

It took far more than that to get governmental approval and win over development-wary neighbors. The innkeepers made their hotel invisible from the highway. They offered 20 housing units for employees. They contributed land for the community’s first fire station, and in all their work, they claim, destroyed just one native tree. Though the woods and stones in the rooms are costly, the developers note, none came from endangered species or protected areas. Five units are sunk into the earth to preserve the contours of the ridgeline, and seven others are on stilts, designed to leave the neighboring redwood root systems relatively undisturbed.

The developers evidently did their homework. Their approach--consulting in advance with their prospective neighbors--worked more or less flawlessly in the halls of local government. The Monterey County Planning Commission approved the project after one meeting, having heard no dissenting voices, and the California Coastal Commission signed off similarly. In 15 years of watching coastal development, said Monterey County senior planner Steven Maki, he had never seen a project with so many potential pitfalls move so smoothly through the approval and construction process.

“I think we got most of it done OK,” said architect G.K. (Mickey) Muennig, walking the grounds one afternoon during the inn’s first week.

The architect, who lives in a tiny studio near the inn, wore jeans, a T-shirt and a straw hat. When I encountered him, he was leading around a photographer from Progressive Architecture magazine, quietly pointing out the native flora and steel building materials already rusting, as planned, into rich orange hues. Though the ridge-top rooms with 180-degree ocean views carry higher prices, Muennig said the elevated treehouses “as an integral piece of architecture, work best for me.”

I was among the elevated. The unit we stayed in, which cost $225 a night in April but now fetches $380, sat atop stilts of pressure-treated fir, plotted in strict geometry. A concrete-and-stone fireplace stood at one point of our triangular bedroom, a view of the ocean at another, a view of the trees and mountains at the third. Sunlight seeped from a long, rectangular skylight above.

Alejandrino Boronda was honored on the wall. Boronda, a cattle rancher, homesteaded in Big Sur in 1917 and with his wife came to own almost 1,400 acres, much of which is now part of the Los Padres National Forest. (Author Henry Miller, probably the most celebrated Big Sur resident ever, has no namesake room because Bill Post, who made the choices, didn’t consider him worthy.)

The furniture was spare: in one corner, a tiny desk and chair of joined branches; in another, a ledge to sit on and three pillows. There are no televisions. But the designers did include a Nakamichi stereo system, with cassette and CD player, in each unit. You don’t travel with cassettes and CDs? The staff will bring your choice, for a price.

Down the hall was a balcony with further mountain views, a closet, a mini-bar and, in the bathroom, a Jacuzzi tub that offered yet another green panorama and featured biodegradable shampoo and “vegetarian formula” soap. Beneath the bed was a folded massage table: The inn keeps a staff of massage therapists, some of them recruited from the nearby Esalen Institute. Inn brochures, which request that guests not disturb the neighborhood wild turkey, deer, coyote and wildcats, were printed on recycled paper.

Expectations can be high when you’re paying $300 a night for lodgings. You find yourself wondering, Should the climb from my car to my room be this steep? Shouldn’t we get a newspaper in the morning without having to specifically ask? Shouldn’t someone have anticipated this itch between my shoulder blades?

Expectations are especially tricky when the hotel is new, and you’re staying on its first Monday night of operation, and then its first Tuesday.

Our sink didn’t drain properly, for instance; but once the staff repaired it, it did not falter, and may never again.

The walk from the parking area to the rooms really is steep, and could be taxing for out-of-shape guests. Management had planned to offer transport via golf carts, but the carts weren’t powerful enough to climb the hill and until replacements arrived, climb-shy guests had to call for a resort van to carry them.

Our Jacuzzi bath filled so slowly that we gave up on it. A few moments after we heard one guest favorably compare the architecture to the Southwestern modernism of Paolo Soleri, we heard another, in a more expensive unit than ours, complain that she had no desk to write on. But management was still awaiting delivery of some furniture, which might have improved her situation.

Sierra Mar, the resort’s restaurant, raised no questions from me, except whether it would be unseemly to order two desserts. Angled along the ridgeline with a glass wall along its western edge, the place offers an ocean view for each of its 20-odd tables. Flowers sit on the tables in stark Japanese arrangements. A small library of books on Big Sur lines the north wall. On your way to the door, you can peek at the restaurant’s collection of 2,000 wines.

The night we ate there, my wife’s first course, crown of artichoke, arrived delicately constructed on a glass slab that was itself an artwork, signed on the edge by its maker. My entree was New York steak with porcini mushrooms and bordelaise sauce, complemented by scalloped potatoes.

We praised and lingered over these items before finishing them. Dessert--mint ice cream with pistachio opera cake--vanished quickly. Later, we bumped into chef Wendy Little, who was recruited from the restaurants of the Four Seasons Biltmore in Santa Barbara and now resides in the Post Ranch Inn’s employee housing, and paid respects personally.

Between meals, we did Big Sur things. Driving and then walking, we found our way to the rocky shore of Pfeiffer Beach a few miles away. We persuaded a mellow sentry to let us peek at the rambling gardens of Esalen (normally closed to visitors without reservations). We browsed at the pricey Phoenix gift shop next to Nepenthe, spotted a few deer in a meadow and lunched at the River Inn, overlooking the Big Sur River. We also stopped by the Ventana gift shop, where, thanks to a nonaggression pact between management and the new neighbors, Post Ranch Inn guests can charge purchases to their room numbers. Then our time was gone.

The Post Ranch Inn’s proprietors have further plans: a lap pool to go with the small basking pool near the restaurant; a gift shop of their own; a spa that will offer facials, aerobics, fitness equipment and aroma therapy, and a network of walking trails. But as the campers up the road can attest, the Big Sur landscape needs little elaboration.

It didn’t need any at all on my second and last morning there, when I struck off on a stroll toward the oak grove. Under the shade I inspected fresh deer tracks, evaded poison oak, considered the ferns, the dew-soaked grass, the glassy pond. Frog talk gave way to birdcalls.

But a guest at the Post Ranch Inn has certain responsibilities, and soon it was time for a final dose of progressive architecture and custom-made granola. He who sleeps on stilts learns to live large.

GUIDEBOOK: Natural Luxury in Big Sur

Getting there: Big Sur is 305 miles north of Los Angeles, 150 miles south of San Francisco and 35 miles south of the Monterey Peninsula Airport. Driving from Southern California, head north on California 101; at San Luis Obispo, continue north on Pacific Coast Highway (California 1). Expect a six-hour trip from downtown Los Angeles.

Where to stay: The Post Ranch Inn (Highway 1, P.O. Box 219, Big Sur, Calif. 93920, 800-527-2200) offers double-occupancy rooms for $245-$450 nightly (higher-priced rooms have better ocean views; lower-priced rooms downstairs in the six-unit Butterfly House share walls). Its entrance--difficult to see as you approach from the south--is on the west side of the highway, less than one mile north of the Nepenthe restaurant.

The Inn’s Sierra Mar restaurant (408-667-2800) offers a four-course dinner, including dessert, at a fixed price of $45. The menu changes nightly; on the nights I was there, each of the two entrees offered cost $25 alone. Sierra Mar is open to the public, but inn guests get first priority and reservations are required.

Incidental costs: Some CDs are provided in each room, but you can also purchase one (mostly New Age and jazz music) for $25. Massages begin at $75 for an hour. Most well drinks are $4.50; the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu is a $16 Durney Chenin Blanc.

Other places to stay: Directly across the street stands the 17-year-old Ventana Big Sur Country Inn Resort (Big Sur 93920, 800-628-6500), where double-occupancy lodgings run $165-$785. Beyond those prominent two, several hotels offer lodgings in the $50-$125 range, among them Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn (Highway 1, Big Sur 93920, 408-667-2377); the Big Sur Lodge in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park (P.O. Box 190, Big Sur 93920, 408-667-2171); the River Inn (Pheneger Creek, Big Sur 93920, 800-548-3610), and the Glen Oaks Motel (Big Sur 93920, 408-667-2105). Public and private campgrounds and cabins are also available. In all cases, reservations are recommended well in advance, especially for summer travel.

Where to sit in hot water under the moon: The Esalen Institute, otherwise open only to paying seminar-takers, opens its hot springs to the public each morning from 1 to 3:30 a.m. For $10 per person, as many as 30 visitors can bring their own towels, lock valuables in their cars, leave all glass, silver jewelry, alcohol and drugs behind, and follow an escort down to the water. Advance reservations are required (408) 667-3047; you can order a seminar catalogue by calling (408) 667-3000 or writing Esalen Institute, Big Sur 93920-9616.

For more information: The Big Sur Chamber of Commerce’s phone message at (408) 667-2100 is not long on details: “It is spring in Big Sur. Sunshine, showers, blossoms and flowers everywhere.” But you can write the chamber for printed information at P.O. Box 87, Big Sur93920. Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

* HIKING: Even closer to nature and less expensive, the Santa Lucia Mountains are a nature-lover’s wilderness. L27