An Historic SoCal Hotel Reopens, Aiming to Recapture Its Roaring ’20s Magic

Good hotels, important hotels, seem eternal. They morph over decades, sometimes centuries, creating distinct geological strata. Now, after years of disuse, the latest layer has been added to the Breakers Long Beach, which reopens tomorrow under a Fairmont flag. 

Robb Report was offered a first look inside the long-anticipate rebirth of the 14-story luxury hotel, which has undergone a complete overhaul that honors the grandeur of its 1926 “ultra-Spanish,” ultra-Art Deco, Walker & Eisen architecture. The renovation of the Fairmont Breakers Long Beach not only creates the singular five-star hotel in the oceanside getaway—a one hour drive from Los Angeles—it also reopens the resplendent, top-floor Sky Room restaurant.

“I live in Long Beach and everyone I meet asks me, ‘Are you bringing back the Sky Room?’” says Mark Steenge, the hotel’s general manager. “That’s what the hotel is really known for, because the Sky Room was in existence for 86 years. I think that is an incredible responsibility that we have, to bring that restaurant back to life in a way that the locals will see as an improvement.” 

Originally a penthouse, the Sky Room itself was born from one of those geological moments in hotel history. As the roaring ’20s faded into the Great Depression, the palatial 330-room waterfront hotel (land reclamation has since separated its East Ocean Boulevard address from the Pacific) was already on the brink. The 1933 Long Beach Earthquake forced it into bankruptcy. Then in 1938, it caught the eye of Conrad Hilton, who made the Breakers his eighth namesake hotel and invested $200,000 into renovations—roughly $4.5 million in today’s money. Hilton envisioned a Hollywood cafe at the hotel’s pinnacle, a Rainbow Room for the West Coast—and he got what he wanted. Over the years, the Sky Room saw Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Rita Hayworth, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Babe Ruth and John Wayne sit down for special “haucomole” sandwich spreads and musically themed “rhyme ripple” cocktails.

The party wasn’t long lived, with World War II replacing the Sky Room’s rooftop fandango punches with pillbox machine-gun turrets. For the next eight decades a revolving door of ambitious owners lost it all trying and failing to revive the hotel’s brief glory days. “God and Conrad Hilton couldn’t have saved the hotel,” Long Beach’s Independent newspaper reported in 1963. Soon after, it was converted into a retirement home. 

So does Fairmont have what God and Hilton didn’t? 

“It’s been a hotel. It’s been a long-term care facility. It was a Red Cross after the earthquake and it was used as a lookout during World War II,” says Steenge. “It really has a ton of history. One of our biggest challenges has been how to honor that history, but be modern enough to suit all the needs of our discerning guests. I think the designers and ownership pulled it off.” 

To thread that needle, Fairmont tapped Hirsch Bedner Associates (HBA), the hospitality design firm behind hotel behemoths including the The Beverly Hills Hotel, The Peninsula New York, and the Waldorf Astoria Cancun. Rooms were reduced and enlarged from over 300 minuscule beds, to just 185 rooms that are on roughly 400 square feet on average. Meanwhile, 22 sprawling suites weigh in at over double that size. This newest incarnation of the hotel also adds Long Beach’s first luxury spa, five in-house food and beverage outlets (including a live music venue on main floor dubbed Alter Ego), and the area’s sole rooftop pool bar, Halo. Most importantly, the hotel adds turn-down and concierge services, which are currently unavailable in Long Beach.  

The renovation happened in conjunction with the local Historic Society and focused on preserving as much of the original lobby and main floor as possible, including crown moulding, archways and bay windows. To gently nudge the building into a nostalgic present, chandeliers, touches of marble and a large number of artworks were added. 

“You can’t go anywhere in the hotel without seeing a piece of art,” says Steenge. “Some of the pieces are photography from the past. There are murals and sculptures, most of which are by local artists. “

Artifacts, including pieces of mail dating to the ’50s and ’60s, vintage matchbooks, old menus and teapots have been added to a display in the born-again Sky Room, still the building’s crown jewel.

Completely gutted and redesigned, the Sky Room is now outfitted with a 24-seat bar overlooking the city and the ocean. Chef Max Pfeiffer, a Long Beach native who previous worked at Michelin-starred Knife Pleat in Costa Mesa, has cooked up an old-school cool menu featuring beef Wellington, a caviar and champagne cart, and desserts flambéed table-side. 

“It’s not the froufrou of tweezers and tiny garnishes,” says Steenge. “It’s really great classic dishes that bring you back to a time of great white-table-cloth service.”

So is this the winning formula that will finally bring this long-troubled hotel back to life? In the mid-20th century, the age of the automobile, new affordable roadside motels spelled doom for a glamorous Long Beach hotel. But today, Steenge thinks car travel will be one of its saviors. 

“I think we are going to get a lot of people from L.A. and Orange County coming to check us out and have a staycation,” he says, noting that the hotel’s proximity to the cruise ship terminal and the convention center will deliver a constant flow of tourists. “There’s also a lot of large international shipping companies here in Long Beach that are showing a lot of interest in us, because their executives are coming from all over the world and are expecting luxury.”

Still, it’s locals, he argues, that will make or break the hotel, and catering to their repeat business with musical performances, DJ-fueled poolside parties, and romantic dinners is part of the premise of the hotel. 

“I think we are going to be the social epicenter of the city,” he says.