The Madonna Inn: One Man's Vision of Everything

Alex Madonna opened his hotel on Christmas Eve of nineteen fifty-eight with twelve rooms, each one decorated in a different theme that he had chosen himself. There was no architect imposing aesthetic restraint. Madonna was a construction contractor who had built roads and bridges across the central coast; he had the materials, the equipment, and the vision, and nobody told him to stop.

He kept building. By nineteen fifty-nine the hotel had forty rooms. By the time it reached its current scale it had one hundred ten rooms plus twenty-eight suites, each with its own identity, ranging from a cave room lined with natural stone to a Swiss chalet suite to rooms covered in petrified wood. The main dining room is pink, heavily so, with gold accents and murals of Western landscapes. The exterior reads as a pseudo-Swiss Alps fantasy in a California valley. The effect is total, immersive, and impossible to describe neutrally.

What Madonna built, one might argue, is not fundamentally different from what Art Beal built on his hillside in Cambria thirty years earlier: one man, with materials he controlled, imposing an idiosyncratic vision on a piece of land without asking permission from any design authority. Beal used abalone shells and car parts. Madonna used pink granite and his own construction company. Both built environments that do not resemble anything else and have been designated landmarks because of it.

The Madonna Inn opened well over sixty years ago. It is not trying to be anything other than what it is.