Here’s a New Development: Old Hotels Are Flourishing : Trends: As hotel construction slows, historic lodgings beckon with character and class.

For lovers of new hotels, these are lean years. After adding as many as 140,000 hotel rooms a year in the late 1980s, the recession-weakened American hospitality industry has slammed the brakes on expansion. Randy Smith, president of Smith Travel Research, of Gallatin, Tenn., estimates that just 30,000 new hotel rooms opened in the first nine months of 1993.

But there’s another side to that coin. With so little going on in the way of new construction, millions of dollars have been redirected since 1990 to the restoration and improvement of old hotels in the United States. ITT Sheraton’s renovators in 1991 spent $100 million on the 87-year-old St. Regis in midtown Manhattan, and another $100 million on the Sheraton Palace in San Francisco near Union Square.

Lodgings like these often stand in prominent locations, delivering more character than many of their modern brethren can summon. I have a weakness for them, and in the last few years, I’ve landed happily at The Brown Hotel in Louisville, the Peabody in Memphis and the Hotel St. Francis in Santa Fe, among others. Now, with Randy Smith and other authorities predicting that such properties will get more attention from their keepers over the next few years, is a good time to check in.

The difficulty for travelers is that, renovated or not, every old hotel is not necessarily a nice hotel. In Brussels last year, I gambled that the lavish 19th-Century public rooms of the Hotel Metropole would lead to similarly pleasant accommodations upstairs. They didn’t (though renovations have advanced since then). To protect myself, I try to dig out advance intelligence from someone who has recently set foot in the place--a worldly travel agent, perhaps, or a trusted fellow traveler.

One place to start browsing old hotels is the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Since 1989, the organization has been encouraging hoteliers through a program called Historic Hotels of America. Designed to recognize and promote properties more than 50 years old, distinguished by “historic character, architectural quality and outstanding preservation efforts,” the program started with 32 charter members and a toll-free number (800-678-8946). If reservations are made through the number, 5% of the room tariff is forwarded to the National Trust.

The Historic Hotels roster now numbers 103, and ranges from tiny (the nine-room Twin Farms in Barnard, Vt.) to massive (the 1,117-room Westin St. Francis in San Francisco), inexpensive ($50 for a single room at the Lafayette in Marietta, Ohio) to pricey ($15,000 for a suite at the Plaza in New York), aged (the Casa San Jose in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, is a 17th-Century mansion) to relatively youthful (the Radisson Admiral Semmes Hotel in Mobile, Ala., opened in 1940).

The California members of the Historic Hotels roster, listed below, are a generally expensive lot. Readers should note, however, that weekend, seasonal or other discounts are often available at substantially less than the standard “rack rates” listed below.

* La Playa, Carmel. Constructed as a rockwork mansion in 1904; 75 rooms and five cottages; double rooms $110-$210.

* Hotel del Coronado, Coronado. The white-walled, red-roofed waterfront co-star of “Some Like It Hot” and “The Stunt Man,” built in 1888; 691 rooms; double rooms $189-$249.

* Eureka Inn, Eureka. Built of redwood beams and oak paneling in 1922; 105 rooms; double rooms $115-$140.

* La Valencia Hotel, La Jolla. A 1926 Mediterranean-style oceanview structure; 100 rooms; double rooms $145-$295.

* St. James’s Club & Hotel, Los Angeles. A 1931 Art Deco apartment building on Sunset Boulevard; 63 rooms; double rooms $200.

* Ojai Valley Inn, Ojai. A complex of adobe-style hacienda buildings circa-1923; 212 rooms; double rooms $195-$260.

* The Steinhart, San Francisco. A 1910 apartment hotel on Sutter Street. One-month minimum stay; 58 rooms, from studios to suites with kitchens; double rooms $2,795-$2,855 monthly.

* The Majestic, San Francisco. A 1902 building in a Victorian neighborhood; 59 rooms; double rooms $115-$205.

* Stouffer Stanford Court Hotel, San Francisco. Built on Nob Hill in 1912; 400 rooms; double rooms $235-$325.

* Westin St. Francis, San Francisco. Built in 1904, an elegant survivor of the ’06 quake; 1,115 rooms; doubles $180-$260.

* The Georgian, Santa Monica. Built in 1933 on Palisades Park, overlooking the beach; 84 rooms; double rooms $160-$215.

* El Encanto, Santa Barbara. Ten-acre property built in Craftsman and Spanish Colonial styles in 1915 to house college students; 83 rooms and cottages; double rooms and villas $140-$220.

Here’s a warning. Lodgings must pay substantial fees to be included in the Historic Hotels list ($4,000 initiation, annual dues $2,500-$7,500), so many notable properties are absent--New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and the Los Angeles Biltmore, to name two. Still, a traveler with historical inclinations may want an illustrated directory, available for $3 (check or money order) from Historic Hotels of America, Dept. L.A., National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1785 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.