Ojai’s oldest hotel opened in 1919, spent decades as something else, and reopened in 2025 as 50 rooms furnished with more than 1,000 antiques and artworks. Two giant tortoises live in the garden.

The building is Spanish Revival, with a Mission-style entry arch and a stone fireplace in the lobby. For four decades it was The Oaks, a fitness retreat, which closed in 2017 after smoke damage in the Thomas fire; it reopened as a hotel on 19 June 2025. The owners, among them Eric Goode, also behind New York’s Bowery Hotel, worked from the original 1919 drawings, and Studio Shamshiri did the interiors.

What sets it apart is that the rooms are filled with things rather than decorated. More than 1,000 pieces, mostly from local estate sales and dealers, include Western landscapes and wildlife studies, and a lobby mural by the 1980s artist Stefano Castronovo, with a T. Rex looking down on the hills. Each room has a custom-embroidered Pendleton blanket and hand-carved birds above the bed. Lighting is lamps, sconces and picture lights on dimmers, kept low and warm on purpose, so the art reads like a house that has been lived in rather than a gallery.

The 50 rooms split three ways: 31 in the main building, 11 bungalows with private patios and kitchenettes (Bungalow 11 has its own koi pond), and eight in Sycamore House, which can be booked whole. The pool has six cabanas under Topa Topa mountain views, and a spa is planned for 2027.

The tortoises are Abra and Cadabra, Aldabra giants on loan from Goode’s Turtle Conservancy, and they seem perfectly at home in the grounds.

It is not cheap: reported rates start around $455 a night. Ojai is about 90 minutes from Los Angeles.