Keating Hotel

The Keating: Pied au plancher

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Off you go! The whole Pininfarina team takes you on board its new rocket, the much awaited hotel Keating, which opened in November 2006 in the heart of the Gaslamp quarter in San Diego. Watch out, you must be strong at heart, because this little jewel was designed as a unique experience, a revolution itself in the world of hotels.

The result of a collaboration between a local businessman Edward Kaen, partner of the Bond Urban Habitat firm, and the Italian design group famous for its dream cars, the Keating was initially a bit of good luck.As the story has it, one day Edward Kaen looked at his Ferrari and realized what a great designer Pininfarina was. He contacted the group which finally after many fruitless efforts decided to play along in the adventure. A very long work began to renovate the historical building in the center of San Diego, whose audacious esthetics mixed ancient and modern and inspired the designers. “The challenge was to take into account the location of San Diego as an emerging city on the West Coast, and provide a place with multiple innovative technological solutions, while remaining within the intimate design of a 35 room hotel. To keep only the essential, without being minimalist,” confides Edward Kaen.

Designed as a luxury sedan, the Keating has both the sporty look and sensual lines which have made Pininfarina the best known automobile designer in the world. From the entry to the lounge is but a step, along the red walls broken at intervals by brick and stone passages, left over from the original building. In the large ergonomically designed room, the furniture and sculptured steel and aluminium bar are also signed Pininfarina. Here the hotel clients mix with Californian society, drinking martinis or cocktails prepared at the table, because in this trendy place elegance has a touch of Italian showiness. The cuisine also has a transalpine flavor, as does the Vault, the winebar, whose brick structure reveals a most astonishing decoration, made from limited edition bottles designed by Pininfarina, holding several superior wines from the best Italian vineyards.

With the head clouded by the tasting, the guest goes up the red carpeted stairs, to reach one of the 35 stanzas, rooms and suites. Inside, no walls separate the rooms, so the spirit can float in this decor dramatized by the huge windows and very high old ceilings that contrast with the modern equipment : Bang & Olufsen home cinemas, LavAzza coffee machines, bathrooms with Dornbracht faucets, Jacuzzi tubs in Pininfarina’s Morphosis line. The most extraordinary suite is the Stanza Fresca, designed as a spacious apartment with two rooms separated by a huge inner garden, simply incredible. This little Italian palace in California has just opened, and yet is fully booked up. We advise you to act quickly, or else you will have to wait a long time to get a room.