Across the United States, Vintage Motels Are Being Imagined for Modern Times | Travel

About halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles sits Cayucos, a sleepy little surf village that calls itself the “last of California’s beach towns.” This coastal community is known for its delicious blue corn tacos and brown butter cookies, a walkable pier that juts out into the Pacific Ocean offering some incredible sunset views, and a perennial summer fog that keeps the evenings cool. It’s also a place that’s brimming with old motels.

“There are pretty strict building moratoriums around here,” says Ryan Fortini, a Cayucos resident who co-owns the town’s Pacific Motel with his wife, Marisa Fortini. “If you really want to go after a creative project, you’ve got to reinvent something that already exists.” So in January 2020, the couple bought a run-down Cayucos motor lodge called the Dolphin Inn and then spent the next two and a half years transforming it.

The Fortinis updated the inn’s once-drabby rooms with white shiplap walls, clean aesthetics and loads of light. They replaced frumpy comforters with parachute linens and added extra beach towels, a lobby stocked with botanical skin-care products and handbags made by Mexican artists, and communal fire pits on the grounds for use by guests and local residents alike. When their newly named Pacific Motel finally opened its doors in September 2022, the revamped property introduced a new kind of boutique lodging to the tiny beachside town. It also became part of a wave of re-envisioned motels that are infusing new life into old properties across the United States—and creating new ways of engaging with communities in the process.

Over the past few years, dozens of mid-20th-century motels and travel lodges that had fallen into disrepair have been reopened as boutique properties. Places like Rhode’s Motor Lodge, remade from a dilapidated 1950s motor inn tucked away in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains; the Ranch Motel & Leisure…