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Developer Alex Madonna (11/19/1918-04/22/2004), who started the Madonna Construction Company in 1935 while he was still in high school, designed and built the Madonna Inn. According to the "History of the Madonna Inn" published on the motel's own web site, the building was erected incrementally. On 12/24/1958, the first twelve rooms opened to travelers along US Highway 101, and their success spurred the Madonna Family to erect 28 more rooms within the next year or two. Their web site states: "Demand for public areas to handle the rooms encouraged us in April 1960 to start construction of the main inn, which was to eventually consists of the wine cellar, bakery, coffee shop, dining room, the cocktail lounge, banquet rooms, ladies’ boutique, men’s gift shop, and the gourmet shop. One hundred ten unique rooms now exist, each decorated differently to suit many individual tastes...rock rooms, waterfall showers, rock fireplaces, European fixtures, and fine furnishings to name a few." Their property sprawls over 1100 acres, and the family used its earthmoving expertise to transport nearby boulders on their land for use as building materials. In its 2014 form, the Madonna Inn contained over 110 rooms, each decorated along a unique theme. (See "History of the Madonna Inn,"

Architect and theorist Charles W. Moore with his writing partner, Gerald Allen, stated of the Madonna Inn in 1976: "It is a special pleasure to give notice to a building (with no architect of record) which is a particularly moving example of the architecture of inclusion. The Madonna Inn, on the highway south of San Luis Obispo, California, would never get a passing grade in a school of architecture where tastefulness was prized. It was built (and keeps being built) by a family of highway contractors named Madonna, whose involvement with bulldozers and enormous pieces of earth-moving equipment puts them in close touch with huge boulders, which they have, with enormous feeling, piled together to make a motel, restaurant, and gas stations. Entry into this motel, past a rock and down a stair into a dining room upholstered in purple velvet, is one of the most surprising (and surprisingly full) experiences to be found along an American highway." (See Charles W. Moore and Gerald Allen, Dimensions Space, Shape & Scale in Architecture, [New York: Architectural Record Books, 1976], p. 58.) Tel: 800.543.9666 or 805.543.3000 (2004).

PCAD id: 2723