Quaint as It Ever Was

Sure, the neighborhood looks calm enough at first glance: the rocky coast, the green hills, the gnarled cypresses, the happy couples murmuring in Italian, German and French, all those cute little storefronts. It’s been more than a decade now since Clint Eastwood finished his two-year term as mayor, and it’s quite easy to shuffle from bedroom to beach to boutique to bistro to beach to bedroom again, viewing this little corner of Earth as the very model of affluence and placidity. Yet in its genteel way, Carmel roils and seethes.

The Hog’s Breath Inn, perhaps the city’s best-known eatery (and Eastwood’s best-known local investment), closed in April, though rumors of resuscitation have been swirling ever since.

In the highlands south of the village, the Hyatt people have invaded, with time-shares to follow. In the eastern lowlands of Carmel Valley, a fancy new hotel, the Bernardus Lodge, opens this summer, aiming to tug upscale visitors from their familiar haunts.

To the north, the region’s most famed golf course, Pebble Beach, is on the brink of being sold, along with thousands of acres around it. To the south, the Carmel River has just been declared one of the nation’s most endangered.

And in the midst of all this, here comes the Carmel Pine Cone with the news that some wily fellow from Aptos checked into the Inn at Spanish Bay on the Monterey Peninsula in March, took up residence in a suite (with his wife and a domestic employee) and ran up a $90,000 tab. In late May, with not a penny paid, authorities escorted him from the premises. An investigation is pending.

It’s chaos up here, I tell you,enough to make you late for tea at the Tuck Box down on Dolores Street. (Good Spanish omelets at lunchtime, by the way.)

But if anyone can grab hold of change and wrestle it into submission, it’s the Carmelites. Over the 70 years since its leaders first formally decreed that Carmel would value its residential character over its commercial possibilities, this city of 4,500 has been drawing lines in its own white sand, trying mightily to protect its rare and wonderful landscape.

If you’re a newcomer, you might begin as I did, with a two-hour walking tour ($15) led by Gail Wrausmann, founder of Carmel Walks. Then, of course, there’s freelance shopping, and eating.

My best dinners were at Grasing’s (pork medallions with polenta, peas, bacon and mushrooms), an upscale nouvelle-cuisine place that’s been open less than six months; the Restaurant at Mission Ranch; and Merlot! Bistro, where they fed me a fine Caesar salad followed by tomato soup with mozzarella.

But even if you never set foot inside the shops and restaurants, you see that Carmel’s home-grown architecture--all these high-priced homes, wedged onto 40-by-100-foot lots that sold for $400 each in 1902--not only would make a Hobbit happy but would intrigue a historian too. After a block of fake Tudor details, Spanish arches and Munchkin roof lines, a Frank Lloyd Wright house turns up, or a public library designed by Bernard Maybeck, or Tor House and Hawk Tower, the rustic stone home and writer’s aerie that poet Robinson Jeffers and his wife, Una, built in the 1920s. (The copper-roofed Wright House is a private residence on the ocean side of Scenic Road at Martin Way. Tor House, on Scenic near Stewart, is open to visitors on Fridays and Saturdays.)

You also notice that in the absence of street numbers, most owners seem to have given their homes names. Hansel. Gretel. Xanadu. Periwinkle. Yes, for plenty of outsiders, it’s all a bit precious.

But just look at the setting of these stones: the green canopy, the creep of fog on the pine slopes, the great golf courses, the driftwood, those gnarled cypresses that gladden the soul and slow the pulse.

You gaze north, gaze south and try to decide: the spectacular scenery of 17-Mile Drive (just north) or the spectacular scenery of Scenic Road (heading south from Ocean Avenue downtown). The answer is neither of the above. Instead, travelers should proceed directly from Carmel to Point Lobos State Preserve (between the village and the highlands), which opens at 9 a.m. daily and charges $7 per car.

Point Lobos is not merely spectacular. It should be pictured in encyclopedias next to the phrase dramatic California coastline. On my visit, I headed first to Whaler’s Cove (where a lone otter snacked loudly in a kelp bed) and then to the Cypress Grove Trail, a loop of just under a mile that includes cypress canopies, crashing waves, the yawp of sea lions and the furry feel of orange lichen on headland rocks.

As for those two other coastal sightseeing options: Take Scenic Road first. It’s free, it’s plenty spectacular, and it leaves you quite close to the Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo, headquarters of the 18th century California mission system and final resting place of missionary pioneer Junipero Serra.

If there’s still time, then take the 17-Mile Drive. The price is $7.75 per car, but the real estate is incomparable, and the home stretch, heading toward the Carmel Gate, is full of gorgeous views.

Meanwhile, back in the pulsing heart of downtown Carmel, a visitor nips from shop to shop, stumbling onto reminders of the community’s roots as a haven for artists and poets, many of whom arrived in the aftermath of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Remembering those years of earnest landscape painters and pioneering photographers, most of them earning a pittance, you can’t help but marvel at the profusion of high-priced art studios and pretty picture galleries today, some say 70 of them, some say 90.

Here is a city where Thomas Kinkade, “painter of light,” sells so fast that he’s the featured attraction in three galleries. Here, in the window of Cajun painter George Rodrigue’s Galerie Blue Dog, cartoonish canines stare stoically across the street at the nudes and landscapes of Edward Weston, celebrated photographer and longtime Carmelite until his death in 1958.

A half-dozen T-shirt shops and a few retail and restaurant chains (Il Fornaio, Banana Republic, Sharper Image, Coach, Big Dog, Crazy Shirts) have elbowed their way into town, but that doesn’t mean the floodgates are open. Just a few weeks ago, at the hint of a Long’s drugstore downtown, crusading residents gathered petition signatures from some 3,000 naysayers.

Of course, the pleasures of this carefully tended place come at a price. If you’re aiming to sleep within the village of Carmel, it’s unlikely you’ll land in a decent room for less than $90 in winter, $120 in summer.

As Carmel’s popularity has zoomed over the years, the city has become home to perhaps the most overdressed collection of beach-town motels in California. Of course, they’re not called motels anymore. The old basic buildings are now surrounded by redwood decking trimmed with upscale linens and outfitted each morning with continental breakfast. Hotel tax revenues, the city’s largest single revenue source, have doubled since 1984.

The good news is that if you’re ready to part with $120 to $160 per night, you have a wide and pleasant set of choices before you. There is, for instance, the Spanish-style Cypress Inn downtown, where Doris Day is a co-owner and tea is served each afternoon. There’s the fancy old La Playa Hotel, and the Sun Dial Lodge, a charming courtyard complex about a block away.

Or there’s the bucolic Mission Ranch, an old agricultural property between the mission and the sea. Once a working farm, it was bought by Eastwood in 1986 and converted into a 31-room lodging. Guest rooms, a handful priced under $100 nightly, are tucked into old bunkhouses and haylofts. On the afternoon I stopped by, Eastwood, his wife, Dina Ruiz, and their 2-year-old daughter, Morgan, were posing by the farmhouse for a promotional photo, and I sneaked up behind the photo crew to grab a few snaps myself. (That evening, Eastwood slipped into a dark corner of the piano bar and lingered awhile, conferring with associates. Plenty of customers recognized him, but none interrupted. Either this was Carmel cool or they were just too afraid.)

Next time I’ll stay in one of those places I’ve just listed. On my visit at the end of May, I slept at the Tally-Ho Inn, relatively affordable (by local standards) at $135 nightly, and outfitted with a tasty breakfast buffet and handsome garden. But my room and kitchenette were tired, from the flawed paint job to the tattered wallpaper. Not a keeper.

Pretty as it is, Carmel is not always convenient. There’s the often creeping weekend traffic on Ocean Avenue, the overburdened transitions to Highway 1 and Carmel Valley Road. And there are the regulations.

Say you’re driving into town on a foggy night, as I was the night of my arrival. You know your hotel is down here somewhere amid the store facades, precious homes and well-protected pines, but local custom frowns upon street lights, and electrified store signs are banned. There are no numbered street addresses within the village confines (everybody picks up mail at the post office), and reading the vertically lettered street signs is no easy trick. Still, while you circle the blocks in search of your destination, you can admire the trees. Cutting one down is forbidden without City Hall permission, even if it’s on your own property.

Mostly, visitors are willing to accept the quirks as part of the larger Carmel package. We see that the postal eccentricities do promote neighborliness and pedestrianism. We recognize that banning home rentals of less than 30 days encourages a more upscale look. And who can condemn the endemic love of dogs? (Human beings may be regulated within an inch of their lives, but leashes on city beaches are merely optional. And several hotels welcome pets, most notably Doris Day’s Cypress Inn.)

But where, you may ask, is that roiling and seething?

Downtown: The April 1 closing of the Hog’s Breath Inn, publicly attributed to the retirement of Eastwood’s co-owner in the 26-year-old venture, Maxine Becker, is a mysterious thing. Nobody doubts that it was making money. Workers were on the scene renovating the place in early June, but there was no word on when or if the restaurant might reopen.

Up in the highlands: Evidently unsatisfied with revenues from room rates that start at $345 nightly, the owners of the long-admired Highlands Inn next year will begin converting 75% of its 142 hotel rooms to time-share properties. The transformation of the lodging, a Carmel Highlands landmark that clings to a high slope four miles south of town and dates back eight decades, passed its last major government hurdle when it received state Coastal Commission approval in December. The move has inspired plenty of complaints. But the inn’s owners seem resolute, and they are hardly newcomers to such deals. They are the Pritzker family, and on May 18, the inn’s owners turned over management to another Pritzker family subsidiary, Hyatt Hotels, and officially gave the place a cumbersome new name: Highlands Inn, a Park Hyatt Hotel. (The inn’s restaurant, Pacific’s Edge, continues to garner rave reviews for nouvelle cuisine, and its more casual California Market restaurant, open to non-guests, remains a great place for a patio breakfast before or after a hike at Point Lobos.)

Down in the valley: The next luxury hostelry in the neighborhood, if schedules hold, is the Bernardus Lodge, which lies nine miles east of Carmel at 415 Carmel Valley Road. With rates starting at $245, the new 57-room inn aims to capitalize on its connection to the neighboring Bernardus winery and will include an upscale restaurant. Each room includes fireplace and private deck. Opening was first scheduled for spring, then postponed to July. As of late May, there still was plenty to be done on site.

There’s consolation nearby, though: Within the last four years, as developers, entrepreneurs and home buyers have increasingly looked inland from closely regulated Carmel-by-the-Sea, the inland Carmel Valley Village has sprouted five winery tasting rooms (Bernardus, Robert Talbott, Georis, Durney and River Ranch) to go with the handful of others sprinkled around the valley.

Just north of town: It was late May when word leaked out that the Pebble Beach Co.’s Japanese owners (Taiheiyo Club Inc. and Sumitomo Credit Services Co.) were in negotiations to sell that company’s 5,000-acre empire of golf courses, hotels and other high-end ventures just north of Carmel. The buyers: an investment group that includes Peter Ueberroth, Arnold Palmer and the ubiquitous Mr. Eastwood. The empire at stake includes the Lodge at Pebble Beach; the Inn at Spanish Bay; the 17-Mile Drive; the Lone Cypress; the Pebble Beach, Spanish Bay and Spyglass Hill golf courses; and the Casa Palmero, a 24-room, updated 1927 hacienda-style building next to the Lodge at Pebble Beach that’s expected to open in August with some of the highest rates the Monterey Peninsula has ever seen, beginning at about $475 nightly.

Just south of town: The bad news about the Carmel River, a modest ribbon of water just south of the city limits, came from out of town. In April, the Washington conservation group American Rivers named it among the nation’s 10 most endangered rivers. Citing increasing water demands as population grows on the Monterey Peninsula, the group noted that the 36-mile-long river is sucked nearly dry every summer.

Of course, many tourists will notice none of these changes. They’ll comb the wind-swept beach at the foot of Ocean Avenue. They’ll wander downtown. Or maybe they’ll just sit still, spend no money and watch the fog rise and fall. A tourist could do worse.

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GUIDEBOOK: Getting Carmel-ized

Getting there: United and American airlines fly nonstop from LAX to Monterey, with fares starting at $128.

Where to stay: Cypress Inn, Lincoln Street and 7th Avenue; telephone (800) 443-7443 or (831) 624-3871, fax (831) 624- 8216; 34 rooms; rates $115-$295.

La Playa Hotel, Camino Real and 8th Avenue; tel. (800) 582- 8900, fax (831) 624-7966. Rates: $135-$235, up to $525 for suites, cottages.

Mission Ranch, 26270 Dolores St.; tel. (800) 538-8221, fax (831) 626-4163; 31 rooms; rates $85-$225.

Where to eat: Grasing’s Coastal Cuisine, 6th Avenue and Mission Street; tel. (831) 624- 6562. Big wine list, fine nouvelle cuisine. Opened in March. Main courses $14.50-$19.50.

The Restaurant at Mission Ranch, 26270 Dolores St.; tel. (831) 625-9040. View, piano bar. Main courses $12-$29.

Merlot! Bistro, Ocean Avenue between Lincoln and Monte Verde streets; tel. (831) 624- 5659. California wine country cuisine, including vegetarian dishes. Main courses $10-$20.

Activities, crowd alert: Carmel walks; tel. (831) 642-2700. Tor House reservations; tel. (831) 624-1813 or (831) 624-1840. Some of Carmel’s busiest summer days are those of the Carmel Bach Festival. This year’s program runs July 17-Aug. 8. For information, tel. (831) 624-2046.

For more information: Carmel Visitors Center, on San Carlos between 5th and 6th avenues; tel. (831) 624-2522.