El Encanto

Above the Mission, where the streets of Santa Barbara climb the slope the city calls the Riviera, a lane runs through gardens of eucalyptus and bougainvillea to a terrace that takes in the whole town, the harbour and the Channel Islands beyond. El Encanto, A Belmond Hotel in Santa Barbara has occupied these seven acres since 1918, and its bungalows are among the oldest hotel buildings on the California coast still in use.

History

The hotel opened in 1918 as a group of Craftsman cottages built for visitors to the Riviera, then a new residential district above the city, and in the 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival buildings were added in the style that Santa Barbara adopted after the earthquake of 1925. For most of the twentieth century it was a favourite of Hollywood visitors who wanted distance from Los Angeles. Orient-Express Hotels bought El Encanto in 2004 and closed it in 2006 for a restoration that grew into a near-rebuild, as the cottages were taken apart and reassembled to current codes. The hotel reopened in March 2013 after seven years of work. The company became Belmond in 2014, and LVMH acquired Belmond in 2019.

Architecture and design

The property is a village rather than a single building. Craftsman bungalows with shingle walls and deep porches stand beside white Spanish Colonial houses with red tile roofs, and a lily pond with a wisteria-covered arbour sits at the centre of the gardens. The restoration kept both styles and added a zero-edge pool and a spa in matching materials. Interiors are light and Californian, with pale wood, linen and tiled floors.

Rooms and suites

There are around 90 rooms, suites and bungalows spread across seven acres, a low density for a luxury hotel in Santa Barbara, some in the Craftsman cottages and others in the Spanish buildings. Many have private patios or gardens, and the bungalows at the top of the slope look over the city to the ocean. Fireplaces survive in several. Rooms are reached by garden paths rather than corridors, and a golf cart carries luggage up the slope.

Dining

The Dining Room and its terrace serve breakfast, lunch and dinner with the view below, and the kitchen draws on Santa Barbara County produce and wine from the Santa Ynez Valley and the Santa Rita Hills, an hour north. The lounge serves cocktails and a shorter menu, and the terrace at sunset is the reason locals come up the hill.

Wellness

The spa offers treatments in rooms opening onto the gardens, and the zero-edge pool sits on a terrace facing the ocean. There is a fitness centre, and the hotel arranges walks on the trails of the Santa Ynez foothills behind the Riviera.

Weddings and events

El Encanto hosts weddings on the lawn beside the lily pond and on the terrace, with ceremonies under the arbour and receptions in the gardens, and the indoor rooms serve dinners and meetings for smaller groups. The hillside setting limits the size of events, and the hotel can be taken over for a wedding weekend.

Location

The hotel sits on Alvarado Place, about a mile above downtown Santa Barbara and a few minutes by car from Mission Santa Barbara at the foot of the hill. Santa Barbara Municipal Airport is about ten miles west, and the Amtrak station on State Street has Pacific Surfliner trains to Los Angeles, two and a half hours south. Los Angeles International Airport is about 95 miles by road.