Sausalito Working Waterfront Business

Kevin Johnson General Manager, Casa Madrona Hotel & Mikayla Restaurant

I oversee all operations of the hotel and the restaurant and right now, of our soon to be completed expansion. Casa Madrona’s got a very colorful past. It’s been a hotel since the early 1900’s. Originally, the nine rooms up in the Victorian house was the extent of the hotel. It was purchased in the 70’s by John Mays and he developed it to what it is today; hirty-four individually themed and decorated rooms that cascade all the way down the hill to Bridgeway. He added Mikayla Restaurant in the 80’s. It has changed names a couple times but Mikayla is actually the name of his daughter. Olympus Hospitality group purchased the hotel and the adjoining property, which is currently our expansion, in March of 1999.

We provide a small meeting room for group business. We’re a wonderful venue for weddings and commitment ceremonies, which we’ve been doing a number of recently. We purchased a booth this year at the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade and had a great, great turnout. We feel it’s a great-untapped market. We already do a number of wedding ceremonies, three to five a month. We also conduct private corporate dinners, anything and everything for business groups or leisure, from catamaran sails to bike tours to sailing lessons to kayak lessons. You name it, we can do it. We are wonderful for special getaways – honeymoons and anniversaries or weekend escapes from the kids.

The expansion will give us the best of both worlds. We’ll still have the thirty-four rooms offering 19th century charm and English style cottages, most of them with wood burning fireplaces. The new rooms will be much more modern and luxurious. We’ll have thirty-one additional rooms and a full spa with eight treatment rooms.

I manage sixty to sixty-five full or part time employees as well as the construction project, which is costing about $10.5 million. It’s expected to be completed by fall of 2001. I’m also very involved with the Sausalito Chamber of Commerce. I sit on the board and I’m also the chairperson for the Downtown Business Committee. I’ve worked in a number of small towns and it pays to get involved. I like to get people excited and I like change. Change is good. Growth is good.

Currently, on Friday nights, we (Sausalito) do Jazz By The Bay through the summer. We also have the Farmer’s Market. That brings people here from the city and surrounding communities. A lot of the businesses downtown stay open late so as people are finished with Jazz By The Bay, they can do some shopping or explore any of the numerous galleries we have here in town. We do a classic car show in October. We’re also doing an entire week of opera By The Bay. That’ll be October 6-10. It is an Opera competition for two age groups, competing for scholarships. There will be portions of the Opera Carmen performed at various locations in Downtown Sausalito during the week. Marilyn Van Horn, the opera star, will be here performing on one of those evenings at a outdoor venue in Sausalito.

The Chamber, especially Executive Director, Rob Franco, really pushed with the ferry company to try to get late night ferry service and lining up the downtown participation we needed to do it. The city worked with us, the business community came up with some money, Tiburon and Belvedere found some more, and we made it work.

Our room rates range right now from $168 to $375, significantly less than for a similar four or five star boutique hotel in San Francisco. That includes a full buffet breakfast every morning and complimentary wine and cheese every evening from 5-6. And City hotels can’t provide our quiet atmosphere, unique charm or views of Richardson Bay that are just fabulous.

We’re working to convince business travelers staying in San Francisco to take the ferry back and forth and stay here instead. We already have what we call our Weekend Warrior promotion, where we have an alternative out of the office boardroom that serves as a good war room for law firms. When our renovations are complete, the new rooms will be much more modern and much more luxurious. They’ll have desks, data ports, a working space – much more business friendly with the same environment of a luxury hotel but with the charming uniqueness of being in the undiscovered gem of Sausalito. All that and the ferry terminal right across the street from the hotel and San Francisco a short and very beautiful 20-25 minute ferry-ride away: I predict more and more business travelers will choose to stay here instead of downtown San Francisco.

I’ve worked in the hotel industry since I was 16. This is my 20th year in the business. I’ve worked for Hilton, Hyatt, Radisson, Marriott, and a few other smaller private hotel companies. When I joined Olympus Hospitality Group two years ago, I went out to Houston and we did the renovations on the historic Warwick Hotel, which is part of our Unique Brand. I got our here June of last year. Most recently, I was at our sister property in Houston. Before that, I was in Laguna Beach for three and a half years at the Surf & Sand Hotel, which is where I met my wife.

I’ll be turning 36 this year. I’m married with a fourteen-year-old son and a fourteen-month-old daughter. I live here in Sausalito, and we absolutely love it. My wife Laura is very active in the Southern Marin Mothers Club. She sits on their board of directors, and is one of the co-chairs for their activities committee.

Olympus Hospitality Group has its corporate office in Scottsdale, Arizona. We have three brand names – Rockresorts, which is four and five star destination properties, Unique Hotels – which are historic or very unique properties and the franchise names Park Plaza and Park Plaza International. Rockresorts has Cheeca Lodge in the Florida Keys; the Cuisanart Resort on the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean, La Posada De Santa Fe Resort and Spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Rosario Resort and Spa on Orcas Island outside of Seattle, and the Equinox Resort and Spa in Manchester Village in Vermont. We, the Casa Madrona Hotel will be the sixth Rock Resort. Some of the Unique Properties we manage or own/manage are the La Jolla Hotel, the Heritage House & the Mendocino Hotel up in Mendocino, the Warwick Hotel in Houston and we are under construction now on another unique property in Dallas, Za Za. We just broke ground on a property outside of Tombstone, Arizona called Bachman Springs Resorts, which hopefully will be ready by the end of 2002.

I plan on staying here for quite a while. I’ve moved around a lot but now that my wife and I are back close to the water and back to paradise, we’d both love to stay here but of course, I’m always open and you never know what opportunities may be around the next corner.