Qualla: Hotel Redondo

Hotel Redondo: Introduction

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The steamship operators from Oregon who built the Hotel Redondo in 1890 understood something that California real estate developers have always known: people will pay to be near the ocean. Robert Thompson and Captain John Ainsworth, Oregon steamship operators who had formed the Redondo Beach Company, chose a bluff above the newly platted town of Redondo Beach and spent approximately $500,000 — a magnificent sum for 1890 — on a High Victorian resort that would draw tourists from Los Angeles and beyond. The Pacific Electric Railway extended a spur to the hotel. The steamships landed at the pier below. The guests arrived, checked in to their rooms in the three-story wood-frame building, and sat on the veranda watching the Pacific.

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Hotel Redondo: The Rancho Land and the Daughters

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The land beneath the Hotel Redondo had a history before the hotel arrived. It was part of Rancho San Pedro — the original Spanish land grant that covered most of the South Bay — specifically the portion that had passed to the daughters of Don Miguel Dominguez. The Dominguez daugh...

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Hotel Redondo: May 1, 1890

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The hotel opened on May 1, 1890, and immediately established itself as a destination. Two hundred twenty-five rooms on three stories, constructed in the High Victorian style that dominated American resort architecture of the period: deep verandas, bay windows, steep rooflines, a ...

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Hotel Redondo: The Spanish Gardens

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1908, eighteen years after opening, the hotel added what became one of its most celebrated features: the Spanish Gardens, a designed landscape in the Spanish Colonial style that was increasingly fashionable in Southern California. The gardens represented an interesting cultura...

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Hotel Redondo: The End of the Era

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Hotel Redondo closed and was demolished in 1925, thirty-five years after it opened. The reasons were the familiar arithmetic of resort economics: the building had aged, the style had changed, the market had shifted. The automobile was transforming Southern California's geogra...

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Hotel Redondo: What the Bluff Remembers

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The bluff above Redondo Beach's waterfront still exists, still looks out over the Pacific, still receives the same sea breezes that made the hotel site desirable in 1890. The Riviera Village neighborhood above the beach has some of the charm that the hotel era established — small...

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