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You don’t expect it to be just past a Denny’s and a McDonald’s on El Cajon Boulevard, but there it is, a neon sign that glowingly announces “The Lafayette” in a grand, old-timey typeface. The valet, who is dressed in a Wes Anderson–meets–skate punk uniform, greets you as you make your way up the checkered tiled stairs and then pull open a door with a brass snake for its handle. The maximalist design of the lobby and, if you arrive on a Friday evening as I did, the big-night-out energy of the place hit you immediately. Locals are sipping highballs and sitting on couches upholstered in stripes and animal prints, the golden light of glass palm-leaf chandeliers glowing above them. You go up to the café to check in—order an espresso martini if you’d like—and head through the property’s ornate, circular main bar, centered on an immense statue of Atlas, past the twenty-four-hour diner (superb patty melt), past the pool bar (killer Painkiller), and enter your room. It is similarly wild: a velvet couch with tassels and zebra-print cushions, several types of wallpaper depicting various vignettes, and, in the bathroom, a hand-painted Talavera ceramic toilet. Everything clashes, but it all works.
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The connective tissue between all the disparate elements of this fever dream of a party palace is obsession and iconoclastically superb taste. That is the MO of CH Properties, the company responsible for the majority of San Diego’s coolest bars and restaurants, from Youngblood to Raised by Wolves. Unlike most hotels, the Lafayette does not feel as if it were made by committee. No corporate board or focus group is going to tell you it’s a good idea to reassemble an abandoned Mexican church for the interior of an on-site Mexican restaurant or to build a two-lane bowling alley in your basement bar in homage to the final scene in There Will Be Blood. It’s these outlandish ideas that have transformed a property that started its life in the forties as a hotel serving the likes of Bob Hope—and, it’s rumored, Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy—into a prime example of what a hotel can be when it thinks of hospitality not as giving the guests what they think they want but as showing them what’s pretty damn cool. And it turns out, a hotel in San Diego’s North Park neighborhood is pretty damn cool. Rooms from $248
lafayette
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