Where the Monterey Peninsula's coastal scrub gives way to white sand dunes and the open Pacific, the links landscape at Spanish Bay was always going to be the dominant design force. The Inn at Spanish Bay, which opened in 1987 as part of the Pebble Beach Resorts expansion, was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to defer to that terrain rather than compete with it — low-slung hipped rooflines clad in warm earth tones, the massing broken into residential clusters that settle into the dune grass rather than rising above it. The 269 rooms are distributed across four-story buildings arranged to maximize ocean and fairway exposure, nearly every guest room carrying a private balcony and, in many configurations, a wood-burning fireplace that earns its keep given the coastal fog that rolls in most evenings. Interiors move between two registers visible in the images — one more recently refreshed, with maple-panel headboards, patterned wool carpet in sand and taupe, and x-base ottomans giving the rooms a calm, contemporary California cadence; another, older layer in the traditional wing favoring warm cream walls and deep plum drapery framing the sea. The wine bar anchors the social heart of the property with a stacked-stone fireplace, honeycomb wine racking, and leather club chairs on dark-stained floors — a deliberately lodge-like warmth calibrated against the wildness just outside. At dusk, the fire-pit terrace fills as a lone bagpiper walks the 18th fairway of the Robert Trent Jones Jr.-designed links course, a ritual that has become the inn's defining signature.

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