156 Rooms. One Mountain. Santa Cruz’s Most Iconic Resort, Newly Renovated.
Chaminade Resort & Spa just finished a $7.5 million renovation of all guest rooms and suites. All 156 of them. Clean lines, elevated finishes and the kind of thoughtful reset that makes a room feel like it was designed for the person staying in it rather than the person photographing it. Add sweeping Monterey Bay views from the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, and you have a property that was already one of the best reasons to visit Santa Cruz now offering an even better reason to come back.
But here is the thing about Chaminade: the rooms have always been the beginning of the story, not the point of it. The point is what happens when you step outside them.
Chef Avram Samuels runs The View Restaurant & Bar on a philosophy of ruthless seasonality: what is local, what is ready and what is worth putting on a plate right now.
His Winemaker’s Dinner Series applies the same standard to what is in the glass. Wendy Figone, certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, leads guided forest therapy sessions through the property’s trails at a pace most people have forgotten was available to them. Finally, Molly Eaton and Cole Yakemchuk of Northern Roots Bee Co. run Beehive Dives & Honey Tastings: full gear, live hive (on Chaminade’s grounds), thousands of bees and somehow by the end of it you are asking questions you did not know you had.
None of this is incidental. General Manager Doug Lord has built a program where the place and its people are in genuine conversation with each other. Trevor Rogers, Spa & Recreation Manager, keeps a wellness calendar that somehow never feels like one. Seasonal spa treatments draw from what is growing locally, yoga and fitness run alongside it and a quiet pool afternoon here will remind you what Saturdays used to feel like before they got complicated.
The new Complete Beach Day Setup Service is perhaps the cleanest expression of the resort’s philosophy: you arrive, and it is all there. Blankets, lounge chairs, shade umbrellas, towels and a cooler stocked with drinks and snacks. You did not pack, and you did not plan. You just showed up, and someone who knows Santa Cruz made it perfect for you.
That is the through-line. Whether it is the fire pit and s’mores at dusk, bocce on the lawn, live music drifting up from The View or a chef’s dinner that reminds you why you loved food in the first place, Chaminade is staffed by people who have decided that this particular stretch of the California coast deserves to be tended carefully, offered generously and experienced in full. Come for the newly renovated suites and the Monterey Bay views. Stay because you just booked a Beehive Dive and cannot believe that is a sentence you said out loud.
