Seven years into the half-billion-dollar renovation of the Hotel Del Coronado, the oceanfront resort is about to unveil the final and perhaps most challenging chapter yet — the restoration of its 137-year-old Victorian building, a project so ambitious it required shutting down every one of the 367 guestrooms for over a year.
While a portion of the red-roofed icon already had been refurbished a few years earlier as part of the multi-phased project — most notably the lobby and front porch entrance — the guestrooms, outdoor courtyard and wood-paneled meeting venues had remained untouched, until now.
Guided by a San Diego architectural firm specializing in historic restoration — with the help of the hotel’s original blueprints and an in-house historian — the project sought to physically recapture the look of the 1880s building and its original charm without sacrificing modern hotel amenities such as big-screen TVs, contemporary furnishings and updated showers. (Just seven bathtubs remain in the entire building.)
A long-ago courtyard fountain and bronze statue of Venus were returned to the garden. And an unexpected bonus — following painstaking research and dismantling of walls and ceilings — are now revealed treasures, among them a fresco, that had been masked by decades of paint, wall coverings and plywood veneers.
On Feb. 15, the first 82 guestrooms will open to the public, with three more room releases scheduled through June 15. Although the rooms were last updated in 2012, the renovation marks the single largest restoration of the Victorian on record. The project also yielded 37 additional rooms, as larger suites were downsized to make room for more guestrooms.
The additional rooms made sense, given the ample inventory of larger suites, villas and cottages scattered throughout the resort, said former General Manager Harold Rapoza, who now is Area Vice President for Hilton. The Hotel Del is part of Hilton’s Curio Collection.
“The Victorian is the most popular neighborhood in the resort because it goes back to 1888, but the property was dated and tired, and after we redid the lobby and the front drive, people got a sense of what the Victorian building would look like after renovation,” Rapoza said.
The hotel already has celebrated multiple milestone moments during the course of the year-long overhaul. That includes a new glass-enclosed sun deck and signature fine dining restaurant, hundreds of refurbished rooms and the addition of 75 high-end residences housing 142 new rooms. A new grand entrance leads up to an expansive veranda that, until its debut in 2021, had not been seen since a couple of years after Marilyn Monroe walked up the hotel’s front steps in “Some Like it Hot.”
“I’ve been here six-and-a-half years and every phase of this project has always exceeded our expectations, but this has been the most exciting because of its history,” Rapoza said.
In keeping with the Victorian’s top-to-bottom makeover, the hotel will also be able to command higher room rates, which are expected to start at $565 for the spring season and jump up to $650 or more during the summer.
Also restored are the Victorian’s historic Crown and Coronet rooms and the ballroom, which reopened last August. And come May, Nobu, a high-end Japanese restaurant founded by renowned chef Nobu Matsuhisa, will open in the beachfront space formerly occupied by Sheerwater.
The overall redevelopment and expansion of the Del has cost its owner, Blackstone, more than $550 million, of which $160 million is being spent just on the Victorian building restoration. It’s a hefty investment, even for a firm the size of Blackstone, which has owned the 28-acre resort for the last decade.
There is no other hotel renovation project, past or present, that Blackstone has invested more in than the Hotel Del Coronado, said Rob Harper, the firm’s head of real estate asset management for the Americas. Adding to the sheer expense of the Victorian project has been the closure of hundreds of revenue-generating rooms since January of last year.
A detailed financial analysis was undertaken early on to calculate the ultimate return on investment. But there are also less tangible factors to be weighed that couldn’t be measured in dollars and cents, Harper acknowledged.
“The long-term benefit of improving the asset more than outweighed the incremental cost to have the building closed for a period of time,” he said in a phone interview. “More importantly, if you think about the entire asset, when this is done, we will have renovated the entire property, and then you can introduce it as new, fully renovated, and restored to its former glory, which has a very different impact than if you’d done everything else but not done the Victorian building.
“Yes, we’re an investor and yes, we want to produce good returns for the people who invest in our funds, but it feels really good to us to not only be investing in the asset itself but also in the local community and to make the Del an economic engine for the city of Coronado.”
Detective work
Not unlike an archeological dig, the work of restoring the 19th century Victorian hotel required meticulous excavation and a fair amount of detective work as construction workers peeled back layers of changes over subsequent decades.
Gina Petrone, heritage manager for the hotel, recalls a day when she went on a wallpaper-cutting mission with the assistant director of facilities. Armed with a utility knife, they began to retrieve samples of patterns the hotel was trying to replicate.
“This was our last stop,” she said, pointing to the ceiling in the hotel’s Ocean Ballroom. “I had heard there had been some art deco wallpaper discovered in the ballroom, and there was a big oil cloth that had been glued to the ceiling, but a little corner was exposed. So I said, pull that cloth over, keep pulling, keep pulling, and we unveiled this 1888 hand-painted fresco.
“I don’t know how long it’s been covered but over the years there were holes cut in it for ventilation and the plans were to not expose the ceiling at all.”
Excited by their find, Petrone immediately contacted David Marshall, president of Heritage Architecture & Planning, which is overseeing the historic restoration project. He concluded that the circular mural, with its colorful, hand-painted floral pattern, is one of San Diego’s oldest surviving frescoes — more specifically a fresco secco, meaning it is painted on dry plaster. The surprise, though, was that it existed at all, Marshall said.
“It’s great fun and very rewarding to discover things or if there’s a an urban legend about a building and you could either prove it or disprove it,” he said. “So you’re clarifying history, and the fresco that was discovered was actually in a room that had never been documented as even having a fresco. We knew that there were frescoes in the music room and the ladies lounge but no one knew that the vestibule to the ballroom had a fresco.”
But there were still more surprises revealed during the renovation, such as open-air verandas and porches that had been enclosed over the years to enlarge some of the guestrooms and painted-over window sashes that originally were framed in a dark red color.
“We documented the alterations to the building, and as much as possible, changes that had been made to the building were undone to bring it closer back to the way it looked when it was originally designed and open,” Marshall said.
At the outset, his team evaluated the hotel’s 1,600 windows and close to 700 doors, photographing them all, and identifying which ones were historic and needed to be preserved.
“About 500 of the 1888 windows were still intact, maybe a little bit more than that,” Marshall said. “Others had been remodeled or lost over the years. The good news was that of those 500, we found they were in surprisingly good condition and very few of them had to be repaired or replaced.”
Mystery doors revealed
Not a lot has changed in the cavernous Crown and Coronet meeting rooms since the latest phase of the renovation. Much of the interior woodwork was refinished, new lighting and carpeting were installed, and the 1929 chandeliers were cleaned and polished, Petrone said. But in the midst of refurbishing the rooms, workers informed her about an unexpected discovery.
“We got a call saying there are doors inside that had been encased by half-inch-thick plywood on either side,” Petrone recalled. “And these were the original 1888 doors, which originally had windows in them, which we didn’t know. So that was a surprise. We had no idea they existed. They had just been covered up over the years. And they found the same thing in the Coronet room.”
While the glass panes were long gone, Marshall said he was able to confirm the existence of the original oak and pine doors — with glass insets — on the Del’s ink-on-linen drawings from 1888.
Modernized guestrooms with a quasi Victorian feel
While the Del’s public spaces and façade required fastidious attention to the hotel’s historic heritage, that’s not so much a priority when updating the décor of the Victorian’s guestrooms, said Marshall. All the rooms were largely gutted to allow for the installation of new electrical and plumbing systems, and the interior design, while honoring the building’s Victorian past, incorporates modern touches and lighter hues.
For example, the design firm, Wimbley Interiors, used vintage-inspired textiles like traditional Victorian florals, but they are lighter, a contrast from the typically darker shades of the era.
The curved headboards recall a classic Victorian shape but they’re made from woven vinyl raffia to give them a more contemporary feel. And bright floral wallcoverings behind the headboards are inspired in part by the hotel’s gardens. Furnishings vary from room to room, featuring different styles of settees, including some made from caning and wicker materials.
The bathrooms, while featuring a more old-fashioned checkerboard marble floor complemented by smaller mosaic tiles in the shower, are more in keeping with the newest hotel design trends.
“For historic buildings, the way the approval process goes, the most important elements are the exteriors, they’re the most sacred and should be altered the least because that’s what the public sees,” Marshall said. “On interiors, you have public spaces like the lobby and Crown Room, which are important to maintain their historic look, but when you start getting to the guestrooms, that’s where you have the most flexibility. So other than the entry doors and exterior windows, most of the guestrooms were completely redone as they had been redone in previous years.”
He noted one historic touch related to the guestrooms, which was the return of the original blue-green color to the ceilings of the verandas and porches.
Considerable work also has been done on the Victorian’s façade, including patching holes, replacing damaged siding, repairing and installing replica windows and repainting the entire building, Marshall said.
Venus returns to the Del
Many of the refurbished rooms in the Victorian building have views of a large grassy area and landscaped gardens where, up until the early 1900s, there was a central fountain featuring a statue of a scantily clad Venus “Rising from the Sea.” Fast forward to 2025, and the fountain — and the statue — have returned.
It’s said that hotel co-founder Elisha Babcock, Jr., thought the fountain was attracting mosquitos and so it was eventually ordered turned off and later removed, says historian Petrone.
“When we were doing the redesign, we found a company in Port Townsend, Wash. that had the exact same statue,” she said. “And they made a mold of that statue and were able to replicate that and make us a new one. She’s identical to the 1888 one.”
As part of the garden’s upgraded landscaping, Petrone said that lime, kumquat and orange trees were added to pay homage to the original garden’s fruit trees.