Cavallo Point Lodge

The parade ground at Fort Baker is a wide oval of grass with the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge standing over it, and the houses around it were built for Army officers in the first years of the twentieth century. Since 2008 they have been Cavallo Point Lodge, a hotel on the Sausalito side of the strait and one of the very few places to sleep inside the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The soldiers left. The porches, the parade ground and the view stayed.

History

The Army established Fort Baker in 1897 to help guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay, and named it after Edward Dickinson Baker, the senator from Oregon and friend of Abraham Lincoln who was killed at the Battle of Ball's Bluff in 1861. Most of the Colonial Revival buildings around the parade ground went up in the following decade, when the post housed coast artillery troops serving the batteries on the headlands. The bridge rose above the post in the 1930s and opened in 1937. The garrison shrank after the Second World War, and in 2002 the Army handed the post to the National Park Service. The park chose to lease its historic core for a lodge, so that hotel revenue would pay for buildings it could not otherwise keep up. The restoration took several years, and Cavallo Point opened in late 2008.

Architecture and design

Two kinds of building make up the hotel. The officers' houses keep their wide porches, tall sash windows, wooden floors and period proportions, and their rooms are divided out of what were family quarters. Above them, on the slope, a group of new buildings holds the contemporary rooms. They were designed with large windows and low profiles so that they sit quietly behind the older houses when seen from the water, and the project was built to green building standards, earning LEED Gold certification. The parade ground was left open as a lawn, and the old street pattern of the post survives intact.

Rooms and suites

The rooms divide in the same way. Historic rooms occupy the old houses, some with fireplaces, many opening onto porches that face the parade ground. Contemporary rooms on the hill look across the water to the bridge and the city, and several have their own decks. Interiors in both lean on wood, stone and muted colours rather than period pastiche.

Dining

Murray Circle, the restaurant, takes its name from the road that loops around the parade ground and cooks from Northern California produce. The Farley Bar is named after Farley, the comic strip drawn by the Bay Area cartoonist Phil Frank, and its terrace is where guests take a drink at sunset with the bridge in view. The hotel also runs a cooking school in a teaching kitchen, with classes open to guests and to visitors from around the bay.

Wellness

The Healing Arts Center and Spa occupies its own building on the post and pairs treatments with meditation and yoga classes. The trails of the Marin Headlands begin at the edge of the property, and the climb to the batteries above the strait is the hotel's best exercise.

Weddings and events

Weddings use the lawns and porches of the historic buildings, with the parade ground and the bridge behind the ceremony. Several of the old Army buildings have been fitted out as meeting and banquet rooms, which suits conferences and retreats of moderate size, and a group can fill a run of houses around the parade ground.

Location

Fort Baker sits on Horseshoe Cove, at the foot of the headlands, between the bridge and the town of Sausalito. The Bay Area Discovery Museum, a museum for children, shares the old post, and a small harbour lies inside the cove. Downtown Sausalito, with its waterfront and its ferry to San Francisco, is about two miles away along the shore road, and the city itself is across the bridge. Drivers coming north take the first exit after the bridge and drop down the hill to the fort. San Francisco International Airport is the usual arrival point, roughly an hour away in normal traffic. Few addresses put a luxury hotel in Sausalito so close to the bridge that its cables fill the windows.