From the ads and the del Coronado's own web page, we expected a big white Queen Anne Revival monstrosity. A nice 692-room monstrosity with broad lawns suitable for croquet and badminton, gardens, and a mix of creaky charm and California casual. We expected a lobby with acres of Pacific window space. Wicker chairs on a chilly deck.

I suppose we wanted peacocks and black swans thriving on the margins of the property. And I expected, as a casual visitor, to be politely booted out. That's the image.

The reality is quite different. It's a big white Queen Anne Revival monstrosity. Exposed to salty, wet wind all the time, the Del must require a steady diet of white paint and finishing nails. Where we expected a broad lawn, we found a busy driveway and a collection of auxiliary buildings. The broad lawns are all gone, sorry. And where we expected to find small spatial issues and possible improvements - well, instead, several large issues were immediately apparent.

We performed two walkthroughs, one on a Saturday evening and another the next afternoon, and identified four or five broad concerns.

First, the Del attracts too many casual visitors. The Del seems to have a triple identity crisis: it is a famous four-star high-end resort but not a noticeably exclusive one; it is a landmark historical hotel (with oddball rooms and maintenance challenges and all that goes with it) but must offer the amenities of year 2005; it is both a private hotel and a pillar of this community, a tourist attraction closely identified with its city but which isn't (as far as we know) subsidized. One result is that casual visitors flock through the lobby looking for the Del experience. This reduces the sheer space available for paying guests and changes the look, feel and purpose of the building.

We were also surprised by the Del's relationship to the Pacific. The ocean and the wonderful 30-acre beach are strong attractions, yet the hotel shuns the ocean in a puzzling way. You expect a view of the Pacific from the lobby and the main public areas, but you don't get a view, or a fountain, or even any visual or aural hints of the water. We assume that the completed renovation will address this.

In the same vein, the Del seems more intent on marketing its former glories than its considerable current assets. The Hotel del Coronado shouldn't be a black and white movie; it should be a color movie with a black and white intro. Still, we saw at least a dozen missed opportunities to capitalize on history and identity in the interior design. (Examples: choice of piano music, consistent signage, period fonts on the signage, available merchandise, front-desk uniforms, on and on.)

Like many large properties, the Del has an automobile problem. Automobiles tend to dominate whatever spaces they appear in, and we feel strongly that resorts should develop strategies to park guest cars as soon as possible, get them out of sight as soon as possible, and develop an alternate way to transport luggage and people around the grounds. The main reason is space. (A standing person takes up about 5 square feet of space, and a parked automobile takes up about 350 square feet; a moving person takes up roughly 10 square feet, and a moving automobile occupies more like 750 square feet.) Automobiles are also an unpleasant visual reminder of the real world. The entry of the Del is dominated by a miniature speedway which immediately sets the wrong tone.

Most conspicuous, though, the Del needs to pay attention to its entry sequence. As guests arrive through the front doors they gather first impressions of the hotel. Obviously these impressions mold all future opinions and decisions about this hotel. From the porte cochere through the entry to the lobby and into the central courtyard, guests are subjected to nearly chaotic pedestrian traffic problems in the lobby, flow-space conflicts with transaction-space, inadequate wayfinding clues, etc. This is unexpectedly awkward.

Luckily, all the important major elements are there; they just need reordering and re-emphasis. Spatial fine tuning of the entry steps and lobby would result in a more logical and satisfying experience for guests and casual visitors alike, bring the Del's identity into sharper focus, and directly improve its business performance.

Whether or not the Del management wants to re-establish the highest levels of service depends on its identified target market, but that doesn't matter: this entry sequence doesn't attract any market.

Entry Sequence / Porte Cochere

Analysis of entry sequence. The entry sequence of a resort should give you a relaxed, sexy, hands-in-pockets attitude, with feelings of territoriality, with a sense of anticipation. Part of the concept of luxury involves laziness. Unfortunately, the process of entering the Del from the street for the first time doesn't give you the feeling you're going to be taken care of. It gives you the feeling that you're about to register for classes.

Beginning from the street:

One. Porte cochere. The Del's porte cochere is an extended awning covering three lanes of temporary guest parking. The structure is plainly not an integral part of the Del. It's an obvious later addition - my guess is about 1982. Its thrust is horizontal, counter to and unreconciled with the vertical face of the building. This utilitarian stepchild belongs over a gas pump. My first instinct is to rip the graceless thing out by its roots. It is ugly, especially on the underside. Guests are attracted by the San Diego climate anyway; when it does rain, guests would be better greeted by oversized red (branded) umbrellas.

More to traffic management, the look of the pavement under the porte cochere is jarringly automotive. The hotel approach should be a place where the balance of power is in the pedestrians' favor. Not here. This area has the look of a three-lane 45-MPH Orange County arterial. You can't impart a sense of comfort and leisure to your guests by forcing them to walk alongside a 45-MPH suburban arterial. The edge of the curb is only about 10 feet from the bottom step leading up to the lobby. This would be poor design even in a municipal street.

This place looks dangerous for pedestrians yet the Del has many guests walking in and out of the front door on their way down Orange Avenue. Every single visitor entering the lobby sees and feels this.

Besides being dangerous, the visual clues here, most obviously the marked crosswalk, are in automotive scale rather than human scale; they are marked to be legible from a moving car . Like a major road, this expanse of pavement is featureless, flat and unfriendly. It needs greenery desperately. Steps should be taken to enhance auto / ped separation, calm traffic, de-emphasize automobiles, and bring the Del's immediate exterior into human scale. These steps could include:

· restricting lane width (and, if a capacity analysis with car counts supports the decision, go to two lanes and convert the innermost lane to a landscaped sidewalk)
· installing an interrupted low red-brick planter between the innermost lane and the bottom of the steps
· installing brick pavement or cobblestones in the immediate unloading area
· installing bollards along the sidewalk
· removing the illogical striped crosswalk (since the entire area should function as a crosswalk)
· enhancing visual detail and visual density to signal that walking is encouraged here
· installing street furniture

and other appropriate strategies for making this a safe and welcoming space for guests as they approach the entry steps.

Entry Sequence / Entry Steps

Two. Entry Steps. At the steps, one turns from being crowded by automobiles to being crowded by other guests. During both of our visits, we didn't enter the Del as much as we squeezed in. Guests ascend on two sets of low brick steps, into a narrow vestibule which feeds directly into the dark wood-paneled lobby. The north side of this vestibule is a large window into the concierge office.

Based on conservative assumptions about 692 rooms, average occupancy, average number of people per room, etc., we estimate that one person passes through this main narrow entryway an average of every five seconds from 8 am to 8 pm. This is very busy. When you consider that visitors tend to slow their pace once in the lobby, that this entrance is only wide enough for one going in and one going out, that people may backtrack and hesitate, and that this average would spike during peak hours, this is an overloaded entryway.
This crowded situation is not improved by the practice of storing guest luggage in a roped-off area of the steps. Foot traffic problems are essentially like hydraulics problems, and there is no sensible reason to narrow the pipe here.

In terms of traffic management, the hotel has both a choreography problem and a sheer-numbers problem. The Del should reduce the sheer numbers of people trooping through. Posted signs elsewhere at the Del instruct casual visitors that any bicycles or skateboards brought on site may be confiscated.

We like the discipline of that sign. The Del misses a trick by not clearly marking the exterior steps downward into the underground shop concourse, and therefore funneling off some of those casual visitors. Or perhaps a sign directing people off to the beach. It also seems reasonable to me to suggest that visitors are welcome in the lobby during weekdays and late evenings.

There are also missed opportunities on the segue between indoors and outdoors. We wondered why there's virtually no attention to the aural environment. Appropriate music would provide felt continuity between inside and outside; enhance a sense of drama and anticipation; suggest a more leisurely pace; support the historical theme; and ease the physical transition to a much darker lobby area across the threshold.

Entry Sequence / Lobby

Three. The lobby. It has to be said first that the Illinois oak and mahogany woodwork in the Hotel del Coronado lobby is gorgeous, and that this is a comfortable, exciting space. Guests emerge from a rather fast entry channel into the square lobby ringed with a mezzanine, the center (locus) of which is marked by a chandelier above and a table with a flower arrangement on the floor.

We observed a common and predicable moment of hesitation about three feet inside the door. This hesitation is important. It happens because the first-time user's options are not clear. Her instinct is to climb the stairs but a sign at the bottom of the stairs ("Resort Guests Only Beyond This Point") is testament that someone has drawn the line somewhere. (Finally!) Her second instinct may be to continue straight out past the elevator to the garden, or turn left past the front desk. But she must do something, because guests are stacking up behind her, and a line of guests behind a velvet rope appears close in front of her.

We disobeyed the sign and climbed the stairs. From the mezzanine it's clear that the downstairs lobby bears a lot more foot traffic than it was ever meant to. An upstairs square office space erected in an otherwise-wasted corner, behind frosted glass and a sign saying, "Private Office," is a reminder that the management of the Del is pretty much straitjacketed by the 1888 Victorian space-planning notions of James Reed. You wouldn't want to cut any of this oak, and you can take the shape of this lobby as a constant. (The Del's National Historic Landmark designation doesn't restrict modifications, but common sense does.)

Having said that, though, the lobby layout cries for help. From the mezzanine you can see the traffic problems below laid out as in on a diagram. The main entry is a flowspace in direct conflict with transaction space at the front desk. The flower arrangement locus is no help - besides striking the wrong stylistic note, it's physically in the way. Usually it's a good idea to mark the perceived center of a place, to have a thing that satisfies that deeply-rooted human preference for centrality, but it's not mandatory and it's not good here. At the same time, the other side of the lobby, the north side, is unused dead space, out of the flow.

This is a better solution: remove the locus table entirely. The room's center is nicely marked by the dangling chandelier anyway. As an alternative, place two period armchairs on the north wall, maybe wingbacks, on either side of a broad antique oak table; use the table as an attractor to draw incoming visitors 15 steps away from the main traffic flow. Make the table an obvious orientation point, with brochures, photocopied maps, perhaps a model of the property. Visitors are looking for an orientation point anyway. This solution alleviates the flow problem, and creates at least a little rest-space in an unused part of the room.

At the same time, this table becomes the place for the Del to crystallize and satisfy free-floating curiosity, communicate what is open to the public and what is not, steer guests and visitors properly, and consolidate its image and its message. It's all about signals, information, traffic management.

And as noted above, music is an intelligent and cost-effective way to create an ambient mood, set the pace to a more leisurely number of beats-per-minute (85 is about right, I think), enhance privacy, underline and reinforce the Del's image, and seque into the central garden.

Entry Sequence / Central Garden

Four. Central Garden. Most visitors are led to the central courtyard by the logic of spaces. If the Hotel del Coronado is the locus of energy for this beachfront town, and this central courtyard is the center of the hotel, then this small gazebo stands at the middle of the middle of the middle. More than any other setting in the building, this courtyard carries unrealized potential.

But as it stands now, to be blunt, this outdoor room is unsatisfying. It seems smaller than the grand exterior facade of the hotel makes you expect, partly because of the height and haptic effect of the surrounding walls, partly because of their color. (I heard the words, ". . . bottom of a well. . . ") The ground here is dead flat. Conventional design wisdom commonly puts central features on higher ground (to satisfy the felt preference for centrality and elevated space at the same time) but the gazebo is not elevated.

As the photograph below demonstrates, there's a strict pathway geometry at work in this courtyard. Casual visitors, still wandering around for that elusive Del experience, are silently conducted from the lobby to the daylight at the other end of the courtyard. It happened to us. Then we stood and watched it happen to five groups of people. Personally, I expected to step out the other end and see a small garden and the Pacific beyond. What you really get is an ugly, anticlimactic asphalt parking lot. Unless the visitor explores one of the alternate unmarked doorways on the perimeter, this courtyard is effectively a cul de sac. This situation adds, with a certain elegant inevitability, back into the chronic lobby traffic problem.

This design is too formal, too geometric, too blank, too flat, it dispels energy into the wrong places; it leads the eye and the body to the wrong places. There is too much flow space and not enough rest space. The existing rest space consisted of four movable plastic chairs. The spatial fix for the courtyard depends entirely on what the space is meant for, of course. I expect the gazebo is removable to make this space configurable for outdoor meetings and ceremonies. If not, then this spatial design has been mishandled all the way around.

One last point: the best single investment I can identify here is the investment the Del should make in an outdoor nighttime lighting design for this space. This low perimeter landscaping, the tall palms, and the faces of the surrounding balconies make an ideal canvas for a romantic, dramatic, tropical illumination design. The present lighting configuration is conspicuously dull. If nothing else, better lighting would greatly enhance the views (and demand, and chargeable rates) for the surrounding rooms.

Conclusions

The analysis above is offered in the best possible spirit. We chose the Del for a pilot analysis, aware of its reputation and hoping merely to find enough to talk about. Turns out there was plenty to talk about.

But it wouldn't be interesting if the Del weren't so fundamentally cool.

If you approach this place as a legend of luxury, Prince Edward, Marilyn Monroe, well, it'll disappoint you. Clearly the Del's most glamorous days are over. But something else comes through in person. One comes away with affection for this hotel. It is old and refreshing and idiosyncratic. Its basic spatial logic dispels energy into the wrong places, it leads the eye and the body to the wrong places, but that's okay. The problems come with the later compromises to heavier use and The Car.

We wouldn't do a thing to change the Del's impractical quality or diminish its character. The worst thing that could happen is a corporate makeover. It's hard not to root for its success.

But the Del management should pay more attention to playing the expectation game so the property can come through on its promises. More fundamentally, they should choose between being a luxury hotel or a de facto state park. Otherwise, the Del is a property with a great future behind it.