Santa Cruz’s new luxury hotel La Bahia slowly taking shape for summer opening

Santa Cruz is known for many things, but luxury accommodations has never been one of them. Not that Santa Cruz is lacking in fine hotels, but “swanky” is not a word you’ll hear tossed around a lot in these parts. 

That is poised to change in 2025. Some time next summer, the La Bahia Hotel & Spa will open its doors, aiming to become the most high-end vacation hotel between Half Moon Bay’s Ritz-Carlton and the best that Carmel has to offer. Overlooking the volleyball nets at Main Beach and tucked neatly between the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and the Municipal Wharf, La Bahia will occupy a crucial part of Santa Cruz’s most iconic drag.

As 2025 dawns, La Bahia is in the middle of its construction phase, rising dramatically on Beach Street. The new hotel is the latest property of Ensemble, the Long Beach-based real-estate developer that also owns and manages the neighboring Dream Inn, as well as the Bernardus Lodge & Spa in Carmel Valley. Earlier this month, I and my colleague Lily Belli, Lookout’s food and drink correspondent, were invited to tour the still-skeletal hotel with its general manager, Markus Krebs. 

The hotel’s official opening is still a bit of a moving target. At its groundbreaking back in the summer of 2022, it was announced that it would be open by late 2024. Ensemble’s web site says “early 2025.” Some involved in the project are saying the summer. Krebs, perhaps as a conservative hedge, says late summer 2025. 

“So, uh, September?” I said, perhaps unfairly trying to pin him down.

“Yeah, something like that,” he said. 

That’s not long to wait, of course, considering that locals and tourists alike had been passing by the decrepit old apartment building on the site for close to 40 years. Much of that time, it was closed to all but rats and intrepid vandals. Still, the hotel coming into shape is not an exercise in cultural erasure, but a deft mix of the old and the new.

What’s new is the 155-room hotel and its many amenities, including 16 ocean-view suites, a couple of new restaurants, a Champagne bar, a full spa, a membership club, a rooftop reception area and even a ballroom. (Room rates will range from around $450 to $850, depending on season.)

What’s not new is the name — La Bahia is the name first bestowed on the property almost a hundred years ago when it opened as luxury apartments in 1926. As a material connection to the old property, its iconic bell tower was saved and is being restored as part of the new hotel. 

The bell tower — which will have no bell, by the way — will stand at the site of a membership club, open to guests and locals alike, with locker rooms and changing areas, surfboard storage facilities and other services for people who enjoy the beach and the ocean. There will be a small bar and seating area there, adjacent to the outdoor dining area at the hotel’s second-floor High Tide restaurant.

“It will very much be a fun place,” said Krebs. “We’ll provide chairs and umbrellas for members. The membership will probably be mostly catering to locals who want to use the beach, and hotel guests and members can even order food with an app, and we’ll deliver it to the beach.”

Lily will be sharing her views on the hotel’s “culinary concepts,” which includes the High Tide and the more casual Low Tide Bar & Grill (I guess there is no “King Tide” restaurant), as well as the Champagne bar and a poolside tequila bar/snack shack. 

Krebs said that much of La Bahia’s offerings will be open to locals, including the restaurants, the spa and the membership beach club. 

On our tour, the ongoing restoration of the bell tower part of the building was off-limits, but Krebs enthusiastically led us through the structure of the rest of the property, now mostly framing. We mostly had to let our imaginations fill in the blank spaces, but you could clearly see the building taking shape. (Our photographer was not permitted to take photos of the inside of the building.)

At street level, the hotel’s entrance features a drive-up for valet parking in front of its broad lobby, with the front desk and a retail store. “This will be the ‘living room,’ as I like to call it,” said our host. “There will be a beautiful chandelier, as well as an art piece all the way in the back, and an art piece there to the left.”

Also in the lobby will be the hotel’s English-inspired Champagne bar, to be called Pearl, with wines and cocktails. “We will have a very intense beverage program,” said Krebs. Santa Cruz expects nothing less. 

Adjacent to the lobby will be the hotel’s ballroom, 4,000 square feet with 19-foot ceilings, accommodating up to 350 people for weddings, anniversaries, convention banquets, etc.

Krebs walked down the wide corridors toward the guest rooms and we got to see one of the rooms in progress. For the design motif, the creatives at La Bahia actually concocted a hip Aunt Elva to serve as the source of the rooms’ interior look, a fictitious conceit to flesh out the design concept. “She was born and raised in Santa Cruz,” said Krebs, “well-traveled, likes luxury, goes regularly to Europe. So, she brought a lot of her ideas to the resort.” 

The hotel will have five floors of rooms, and the sixth will be the spa. “The spa will be stunning,” promised our host. Both guests and outsiders will be able to access the spa for any one of its various treatments, with four outdoor rooms and four indoor rooms and a rooftop sauna that looks out over Monterey Bay. A terraced, open reception area just below the spa called the Seaside Roof Deck, a grandiose patio essentially, will accommodate more than 400 people, and suggests that much of the La Bahia experience will be outdoors in the sea air and sunshine.

And then, of course, there is the pool, now just a broad trough on an outdoor deck facing the bay at the center of the complex. From the pool, you can look up and back away from the ocean to see the breathtaking vistas that the spa’s clients will enjoy. On one side, up a level, you can spy the Seaside Roof Deck, and opposite of that, the primo suites for the big spenders. 

The pool, sadly for us locals, will be for hotel guests only. On a chilly December day amid the mess and noise of construction, it’s not a very inviting space. But it’s not a great leap to see when finished, this will be a magnificent spot to waste time. Whether I, as a local not accustomed to luxe digs, will ever get to experience it, that’s an open question. Maybe Aunt Elva will remember me fondly on my birthday.

For more on La Bahia Hotel & Spa, go here. 

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