Home Care In Ojai, CA

Location: Ojai, California

Designers: Ramin Shamshiri, Eric Goode, and Jeremy McBride

On Offer: Ojai’s oldest hotel reemerges after a 50-year hiatus with a renewed take on Spanish Revival design and California-Mexican cuisine.

The lobby and adjoining lounges boast fringed leather sofas with a warm patina, woven rugs in deep reds and ochres, and a commanding stone fireplace—a restored relic of the original property—that invites dark drinks and long conversations. Monterey-style furnishings and lived-in details heighten the languid ease, a mood perfectly in step with the sensibilities of partner Eric Goode, co-creator of New York’s Bowery Hotel, and interior designer Ramin Shamshiri.

Outdoors, the gardens echo the Los Padres wilderness, luring guests along winding paths planted with desert botanicals. Bungalows are marked by hand-painted animal tiles, while sculptural chairs, Mediterranean fountains, and tiled corners appear like small discoveries along the way.

Standout Features: Two Aldabra giant tortoises, Abra and Cadabra, occupy a dedicated sanctuary championed by Goode, offering guests a rare, thoughtful encounter. Beyond a tunnel of bougainvillea, the pool opens to the backdrop of the Topa Topa mountains. Sage-green umbrellas, striped loungers, and towering dragon trees cast shade over the water, channeling midcentury Mexican resorts through a distinctly Ojai lens.

Vibrant California produce and Ojai’s ties to Mexican cuisine shape the menu at Condor Bar, the hotel’s headlining restaurant from chef Brandon Boudet and restaurateur Warner Ebbink, the duo behind Los Angeles mainstay Little Dom’s. Anchored by a wood-fired grill, the kitchen turns out bold, elemental plates: beef cheek suadero vampiro, local tomato and melon dusted with chicatano ants, seabass caught nearby, and a Santa Barbara sea urchin tamal. Denizens and travelers mingle over agave spirits and natural wines in a space that feels at once like a neighborhood fixture and a destination in its own right.

You can feel settled in pretty quickly at Ojai’s Hotel El Roblar.

The sense of place begins in the Old West-style lobby, where a pair of aged leather couches beckon near the rough-hewn stone fireplace. The Spanish Revival-style property — comprising 31 rooms in the main building and 11 one-bedroom bungalows — has been designed as an homage to Ojai itself, an artistic haven north of Los Angeles known for its “pink moment” sunsets and avocado and citrus orchards. Near the check-in desk, old photographs of the place line the hallway. Custom-made Pendleton blankets lie at the foot of every bed, woven with the words “Hotel El Roblar. Ojai, California 1919.”

“It’s Ojai’s longest-standing hotel, and it’s been around for 105 years,” says producer and entrepreneur Jeremy McBride, one of four co-owners of Hotel El Roblar, where rooms start at $495 a night. Adds fellow owner Ramin Shamshiri, one of the hotel’s designers, “It’s in the center of town, and it would be the central meeting point where everyone would go to spend time, both locals and tourists.”

But that centrality had long fallen to the wayside. For decades, the property had operated as The Oaks at Ojai, which Shamshiri explains was “a long-term-stay spa and health center. It wasn’t terribly open to the public unless you joined their program.”

Now McBride, Shamshiri and their partners, Tiger King co-creator Eric Goode (the hotel’s lead designer) and restaurateur Warner Ebbink, have returned the 2-acre property to its old California roots, reviving the original name and undertaking a painstaking restoration. They restored the white stucco archway that once fronted the street as well as the lobby’s fireplace and wood paneling. Archival research, conducted at the Ojai Valley Museum, the Warner Bros.’ studio library, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (a natural history museum at the University of California, Berkeley), informed the process. “When we started to do the research of exactly what it was, we found the old photography and drawings of the place and just really wanted to recapture its original glory,” says Shamshiri. “The whole property is meant to feel like it’s always been there.”

Soft-opened in June, the lushly landscaped Hotel El Roblar boasts private garden terraces for many of the rooms and outdoor garden patios for all of the bungalows; an inviting pool bedecked with sage green umbrellas and yellow-striped loungers; and two restaurants, daytime café La Cocina and Mexican restaurant Condor Bar, where must-try dishes include the duck leg carnitas and the beef cheek vampiro (a type of taco).

Hotel El Roblar is already becoming a bit of a scene. On a recent weekday, the Condor Room was humming at dinnertime: Among other glitterati, THR spotted fashion designers Anna Getty and Heidi Merrick and A-list photographer Stewart Shining at various tables. The buzz is hardly surprising given the owners’ pedigree: Shamshiri, who’s married to NBCUniversal Entertainment & Studios chairman Donna Langley, is an A-list designer who’s working on several high-end residential projects in L.A. Ebbink is the co-owner of Hollywood-beloved Little Dom’s restaurant in Los Feliz and the new Bar Lou bistro in Montecito. Goode is the NYC nightlife and restaurant impresario who co-created the famed ’80s nightclub Area and co-owns the Waverly Inn with Graydon Carter; in recent years, he’s enjoyed a second life as a successful documentary director and producer (he also created the 2024 docuseries Chimp Crazy). McBride and Goode are partners in Goode Films and produced both of his hit Netflix shows.

“It’s not every day the oldest hotel in Ojai comes up for sale,” says Goode, who is also the founder of the Turtle Conservancy, which protects endangered turtles and tortoises around the globe and operates a conservation center in Ojai. (In fact, two giant lumbering Aldabra tortoises, a vulnerable species, live on-site at Hotel El Roblar, on loan from the Turtle Conservancy.)

“I spent three indelible years as a child in Ojai in the late ’60s, where I first fell in love with the back country and the natural world,” adds Goode, whose love of fauna and flora is manifested throughout the hotel. Everywhere you look, elements of the natural world surround you, most notably references to the California condor, once widespread across North America. “By the 1980s,” says Goode, “only 22 remained, surviving in the Sespe Wilderness just behind Ojai. As the last refuge for this iconic species in North America, we felt it was deeply important to honor the condor here.” (Goode’s and McBride’s next entertainment project is, says the former, a docuseries about the “multimillion-dollar world of exotic reptile smuggling.”)

The property also reflects Ojai’s artistic DNA. In guest rooms, you’ll find vintage Ojai Music Festival posters, paintings by local artists and treasures unearthed at local estate sales. Even the wraparound mural in the hotel’s lobby nods to Ojai’s past, depicting figures such as Edward Libbey, the developer of the town’s downtown area, ceramicist Beatrice Wood and spiritual figure Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Despite the efforts to honor the town, not every local was on board with the owner’s plans. Amid municipal maneuvering to block the hotel’s plans for valet parking, it took three years to win permitting approval from the city, whose past and present celebrity residents include Jason Segel, Donald Glover, Anne Hathaway, Ellen DeGeneres and Reese Witherspoon.

There are a few elements still in the works, including a spa and the soon-to-open Sycamore House, a board-and-batten structure that will include eight additional guest rooms. The owners also have plans for music and event programming.

Within walking distance of the hotel are downtown spots like the Ojai Playhouse (recently restored by music industry impresario David Berger); popular restaurant Rory’s Place; Ojai Ice Cream (owned by producer Jonathan Berg and his wife, Kodi Kitchen Berg, and director Will Gluck and writer Trista Gladden); and the Chaparral Auditorium, where Jon Bernthal recently launched the Ojai Theatre Festival. “It’s become this great spot finally in town that you can go to as a destination and be part of a little, small community,” says McBride of the hotel. “There’s nothing really like it that exists right now.”

This story appeared in the Sept. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

A lawsuit accusing an Ojai City Council member of violating California's open meeting law by disclosing confidential information from closed council sessions can proceed under an Aug. 19 appeals court decision.

Leslie Rule could still appeal the lower court's dismissal of the case to the Supreme Court of California, but that court accepts only a small fraction of the cases it's asked to hear. Rule did not respond to interview requests, and her attorney declined to comment.

A document she filed Aug. 5 with the city, asking it to pay for her legal representation, indicates that she does plan to appeal to the state Supreme Court.

The dispute started shortly after Rule was elected to the council in 2022. At that time, the Ojai City Council had recently approved an apartment project known as Ojai Bungalows, with 67 units spread across four different properties in the city. A citizen group called Simply Ojai sued the city to stop the development, and Ojai residents also began gathering signatures for a referendum to overturn the city's approval.

The City Council held a series of closed sessions in late 2022 and early 2023 related to the Simply Ojai lawsuit, the Ojai Bungalows project and the potential referendum. The Brown Act, which sets rules for open meetings for city councils and other local government agencies in California, allows legislative bodies to meet in private in certain circumstances, and discussing pending or likely lawsuits is one of them.

Rule did not think the council was complying with the Brown Act, and she felt that behind closed doors, some council members appeared to be siding with Simply Ojai. During some of her first meetings on the council, she spoke from the dais and distributed written material to the audience that gave details of the council's private discussions.

This was a Brown Act violation on Rule's part, according to an investigation by the Ventura County District Attorney's Office. The DA's office concluded that the City Council also violated the Brown Act, as Rule had alleged, because some of its closed sessions covered topics that were not properly disclosed on the council's published agendas. The Brown Act requires local government agencies to inform the public of the topics of closed sessions and the outcome of most votes taken in closed sessions.

After the DA's office released its report, the City Council voted 4-1 to acknowledge its violations and follow the Brown Act in the future. Rule voted against that motion, but the DA's office said she pledged separately to follow the law, and it considered the matter resolved.

Appeals ruling sends case back to trial court

In April 2023, a group of seven people, led by Ojai resident David Byrne, sued Rule under the Brown Act. Their lawsuit also named Jon Drucker, Rule's attorney, as a defendant, because he also spoke in City Council meetings about closed-session discussions and handed out the written descriptions of those sessions.

In court filings, Rule and Drucker denied that they violated the Brown Act. They also asked to have the case thrown out under California's anti-SLAPP law.

SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation." Anti-SLAPP laws like California's provide an avenue to have a lawsuit quickly dismissed if it seeks to punish someone for exercising their free speech rights on a matter of public concern.

In October 2023, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Ben Coats ruled in favor of Rule and Drucker's anti-SLAPP motion and dismissed the lawsuit against them. Byrne and the other plaintiffs appealed, and last month the state appeals court overturned the Superior Court ruling.

In her ruling, which was joined by two other appeals court justices and officially published by the court on Aug. 19, Associate Justice Tari Cody wrote that the trial court did not properly analyze whether the anti-SLAPP law should apply.

The appeals court did not rule on the underlying question of whether Rule violated the Brown Act. The case will now go back to Ventura County Superior Court, unless the California Supreme Court intervenes.

There is a "public interest exemption" in California's anti-SLAPP law, which states that the law does not apply to lawsuits that deal with matters in the public interest and don't seek any special remedy for the plaintiffs themselves. The appeals court ruled that Byrne's lawsuit should fall under that exemption.

David Loy, the legal director for the First Amendment Coalition, said the point of the anti-SLAPP law is to make sure that lawsuits targeting protected speech don't have "a chilling effect on speech in matters of public interest."

The First Amendment Coalition is a nonprofit that advocates for press freedom and open government and has brought a number of Brown Act lawsuits against government agencies.

Loy said the Ojai case wasn't covered by the anti-SLAPP law because "this is not about one person trying to make money off another person, trying to win a judgment that says, 'You owe me $100,000.' The plaintiffs are not trying to profit from this."

City has refused to cover Rule's legal fees

"My clients are not asking for any monetary damages, just for the court to tell her she's wrong and prohibit her from doing it again," said Sabrina Venskus, an attorney for Byrne and the other people who filed the lawsuit.

Venskus said she disagrees with the district attorney's conclusion that the Ojai City Council violated the Brown Act by discussing topics in private that weren't property covered in its public agendas. Even if that was a violation, Venskus said Rule isn't allowed to respond by disclosing confidential information. Instead, Venskus said, the proper remedy is to take the matter to the district attorney or file a lawsuit against the city.

“There are provisions in the Brown Act to address the issue if she thinks something must be disclosed, and she did not go through those procedures," Venskus said. "She was advised very clearly by the city attorney that this is how you go about dealing with the issue that you have, but it’s not to take it into your own hands.”

If Rule loses in Superior Court, she may have to pay the plaintiff's legal fees. The original court ruling called for Byrne and his fellow plaintiffs to pay Rule's legal feels, which were about $79,000. Since that decision was overturned, they will no longer have to pay.

Rule has repeatedly asked the city to cover her legal costs, and the city has repeatedly refused. The most recent request Rule filed was Aug. 5. It asked the city to "authorize and fund" her legal costs, including for a petition to the California Supreme Court to review her case.

In a claim filed by Rule with the city on June 20, she said her legal fees had totaled $352,000. That claim accuses the city of retaliating against her by not funding her legal defense, and by excluding her from closed sessions and filing a brief in support of the lawsuit against her.

Ojai Bungalows now in development

The legal dispute over what Rule said about the closed City Council sessions has outlived the dispute over the Ojai Bungalows apartments. Work is now underway at the properties, where the developer, The Becker Group, plans to build a total of 63 new units and preserve 25 existing units on one property.

The voter referendum that could have overturned the city's 2022 approval of Ojai Bungalows never made it to the ballot. In August 2023, the developer, Jeff Becker of Ventura, withdrew his application, and the City Council voted to take the referendum off the March 2024 ballot.

Becker then submitted a new development plan for the four properties, and in December 2023 the City Council approved a settlement with the developer to allow the project to move forward. A new state law that took effect in 2024 would have allowed Becker to build without City Council approval and without preserving any of the existing units, and to include fewer affordable units than were in the final development agreement, according to an explainer on the agreement posted to the city's website.

Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at [email protected]. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.