Owners of Pacific Grove’s future hotel go smaller in hopes of a bigger prize.

When developer Nader Agha proposed a 275-room hotel for downtown Pacific Grove across from Jewell Park about a decade ago, residents feared Agha was about to slap a huge, boxy low-budget hotel in the middle of town. Opponents pushed for a smaller boutique hotel, more like Carmel’s L’Auberge with just 20 rooms. Eventually Agha acquiesced, taking the room number down to 225, then to 116 when it was approved by the P.G. City Council in 2018.

Agha’s family sold the property in 2020 to a new local ownership group, who hired a builder, West River Hotels, to review the approved plans. West River’s president, Robert Leach, says the Spanish-style exterior echoing the neighboring Museum of Natural History and P.G. Public Library buildings was good, but the interior rooms were a different matter. If they were going to push the newly named Pacific Grove Hotel from a mid-level luxury hotel to one worthy of four stars, their play would be to take the hotel even smaller, to 102 rooms.

One glaring issue, Leach says, was guest room ceiling heights, originally set at eight feet, more common in hotels built 50 years ago. “In most hotels in the modern world, nine feet is the accepted standard,” he says. The 12-foot wide rooms were pushed to 13 feet, nine inches. “Cubic feet matter to people,” Leach says.

Pushing rooms up and out meant shrinking the number of rooms, but it will also mean adding some height to rooftop appurtenances for the hotel’s mechanical needs, says P.G. Community Development Director Alyson Hunter. (The building height will remain at the city’s 40-foot limit.)

In addition, parking will all be onsite in an underground garage using car lifts, eliminating use of a parking lot across the street on Fountain Avenue.

Finally, West River is asking to use a portion of the roof for a chef’s garden and yoga classes for guests only. Leach says if the hotel is going to compete with bigger hotels on the Peninsula, it will need to offer amenities like morning and evening yoga and meditation sessions overlooking Monterey Bay. Leach thinks neighbors won’t mind the quiet rooftop uses.

Those neighbors will get to weigh in at 6pm on Wednesday, Feb. 16, when the Pacific Grove City Council is scheduled to review and vote on the plan changes. An agenda with information on how to participate via Zoom will be available ahead of the meeting at bit.ly/PGagendas.