Charles F. Plummer's seven-story Italian Renaissance Revival palazzo has watched over Santa Monica Beach since 1926, when it opened as Club Casa del Mar, a private bathing club for the city's well-heeled set. The building's arched loggias, red-tile roof, and warm red-brick facades gave it an authority that outlasted its original purpose through decades of subsequent use, and when HLW International and Thomson Design Associates undertook a restoration exceeding $50 million, they had the good sense to leave Plummer's massing and ornamental logic largely intact. Hotel Casa del Mar reopened in 1999 with 129 rooms and suites, earning a place on the National Register of Historic Places. Michael S. Smith returned in 2014 to rework the lobby and key suites, bringing his characteristic layering of American traditional furniture with coastal inflection: dark-stained four-poster beds with barley-twist posts, antique mercury-glass mirrors, and ikat-patterned armchairs pulling the Pacific's blue-greens indoors. The arched windows visible throughout the rooms are Plummer's greatest gift to the interior designers who followed him — they frame the beach and pier like paintings, requiring almost nothing else. The pool terrace, set between the building's flanking wings with blue-and-white striped umbrellas and limestone paving, draws directly from the Lido hotel typology of the Italian Adriatic. Inside Terrazza, the all-day restaurant, oversize hanging fern baskets and blown-glass pendant chandeliers in amber and teal give the dining room a generous, greenhouse-like warmth, with wicker seating and aquamarine floor tiles completing the picture.

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