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Scotia Lodge (formerly Scotia Inn), a stately building with a portico and white balconies, is Scotia’s most ambitious renovation project. The town’s only hotel, built in 1925, was built to provide temporary housing for Pacific Lumber’s new employees rather than to house visitors. As many Californians who would have otherwise taken long vacations during the pandemic instead traveled upstate, a veteran hotelier named John O’Connor saw an opportunity. He along with his wife Amy and some staff bought the lodge and renovated the bar and restaurant. He trimmed the front garden. The lodge currently hosts weddings on a regular basis. This was the site of a recent ketamine therapy retreat.
I met O’Connor in the hotel lobby. He was wearing brown work boots and a utility jacket. He has dirty blond hair and a wispy beard. He said that after he and his wife bought the hotel, he heard rumors that it was haunted. “We called a real estate agent friend who is a Christian minister,” he said. The pastor brought in several members of his congregation who had experienced paranormal phenomena. “They prayed, they sang, they did all of that,” O’Connor said, describing the event as “like an exorcism.” In the end, his friend concluded that even if there were ghosts in the hotel, they posed no threat to visitors.
This lodge once had 100 small rooms. When I visited, only two of the three floors had been renovated. Mr O’Connor said the occupancy rate for vacant rooms was just under 60% last month (March 2023), but will rise to three-quarters full in the summer. Little did most guests know they were staying in one of America’s last corporately owned towns. “Half of the people come for the sequoias,” O’Connor said. On a dimly lit wall, a black-and-white photo of a lumber worker hung next to a sign advertising “Daily Delivery of Decent Cannabis.” At the front desk, he was able to purchase rolling papers for $2.75 each.
O’Connor takes me downstairs to a basement space he’s converted into a hideaway bar, complete with beaded chandeliers and geometric flooring. Another light fixture behind the bar gave the space a purple glow. I followed O’Connor into a restricted hallway. There, his team was installing a spa featuring Himalayan salt bath crystals and luminous inlays. “I think the Bay Area tech population loves this type of experience,” he said. When I visited last spring, he told me about his ambitious plans to install a backyard pool with a bar like the one at the Ace Hotel. However, he has since discontinued efforts to revitalize the lodge. California’s legal cannabis market is struggling, he told me, and high interest rates have made it difficult to get favorable financing terms from banks. In Scotia, the “vision of Napa Valley 2.0” that combined wine and cannabis experiences “didn’t really happen,” he said. In November, he put the hotel on the market for $3.3 million.
The morning after I met O’Connor, I woke up early and walked across the street to the Scotia offices as logging trucks whizzed down Main Street. Most Fridays, Dyke is on a conference call with Joan Kramer, Marathon’s former managing director who now works as an outside consultant for the fund and is responsible for all Scotia issues. Other Marathon executives used to visit regularly to check on progress, but they no longer do so. “Marathon doesn’t even ask for our financial status,” Dyck said. “Their auditors ask.” Kramer comes to town several times a year, but what Scotia will be like in the 21st century depends on what Dyke and his colleague Mary Bullwinkel can imagine. There is.
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