The Only Hotel in Town

Vacationers had several hotels to choose from when visiting San Anselmo at the turn of the 20^th century. There was Hotel Rossi, located where the Cheda Building now stands, the Linda Vista at Pine Street in a natural park of 20 acres, Villa Cazeaux in the 600 block of San Anselmo Avenue, and the Ancha Vista Hotel on the eastern slope of Red Hill behind Chapel of the Hills. By 1920, all had closed except the Ancha Vista.

In 1925, Robert Carey, a local real estate developer, purchased a building constructed in 1908 by James Tunstead and located where the Wells Fargo Bank building is now at Tunstead and San Anselmo Avenues. Croker moved the building to a vacant lot down the street which he had purchased from the James Tunstead estate. The building at the Tunstead site had had numerous tenants; the primary one was Hund’s Poppy Drug Store and early photographs also picture the San Anselmo Chop House and Oyster Depot and a billiards parlor. It was common in those days to move buildings rather than demolish and rebuild.

The San Anselmo Herald reported that Carey planned to remodel the building on its new site. In December 1925, a furniture store moved into the lower storefront, and in 1926 Hotel Anselmo opened on the upper floor. It offered sunny rooms with hot and cold running water for $1-1.50 per day or $4-5 per week. When the Ancha Vista closed in the early 1930s, Hotel Anselmo was the only hotel in town.

It has operated continuously at 339 San Anselmo Avenue as Hotel Anselmo, then San Anselmo Hotel and now as the San Anselmo Inn. It remains the only hotel in town.

During the 1930s, Hotel Anselmo accommodated travelers passing through, and home-cooked meals were served family-style to the guests. In 1940, Mr. & Mrs. Edward Shepard took over management and added a roof garden; the hotel was “said to be well-filled with a fine class of people.” During the housing shortage of the war years, the Shepards turned away many people seeking temporary or permanent shelter and some slept in their cars in the parking lot next to the hotel.

In 1947, the hotel was purchased by Lester and Nina Robinson who operated it until the early 1970s as a residential hotel “for nice people with free parking and free television.”  The Robinsons renamed it San Anselmo Hotel.

Remodeling and landscaping gave the hotel a new look in 1973. The long-term residents were described as “many retired people who have relatives in the area but who do not want to live with their in-laws.”

It is evident from a visual inspection of the building that there have been additions to both the front and the back. The hotel seems to have gone from shabby to nice as it underwent remodeling and upgrades when ownership changed over the years. It must have been a bit rundown when current San Anselmo resident Jaccy Gouly first came to town and stayed at the San Anselmo Hotel while looking for a place to live. Her diary entry on September 11, 1984 reads, “Moved to San Anselmo Hotel – a real dump! Feel I must be watching a movie – I can’t really be living in this hot, dirty room. Started looking for an apartment.” Then on September 17, she wrote, “Moved out of the San Anselmo Hotel, with pleasure.”

The hotel continued to cater to monthly tenants until the mid-1990s when the Wettsteins, the owners at the time, recognized that the demographics and  character of the town had changed. They remodeled, creating the San Anselmo Inn, a boutique hotel welcoming tourists to the area. It has remained this way under the ownership of Julie and Peter McNair and now that of Benedetto Cico. The 15-room inn attracts many foreign visitors and friends and relatives of town residents. Recent renovations have revealed some of the original redwood studs and siding and remnants of the old knot-and-tube electrical wiring. The wainscoting in the hallways has been repaired and refinished.

While the hotel operated on the second floor, the first-floor storefronts were leased to many different tenants over the years. Red Robin Sandwich Co. was located there in the 1940s making sandwiches and distributing them to drugstores, fountains and bars. Red Robin moved to Kentfield in the late 1940s, then to Larkspur in 1965 where it remained until closing in 2017.

When Red Robin left, a laundromat took its place and operated there until 1973. Many San Anselmo residents will remember the French restaurant, La Chaumière, that followed. First under the ownership of Georges and DeeDee Lebugle and then Rene Hechinger, the restaurant was noted for its classic French cuisine and its interior décor with floral-print fabric covering the walls and rising to a tented ceiling. In the storefront to the right of La Chaumière was L’Ark, specializing in gifts for animal lovers.

A succession of restaurants followed La Chaumière: Anselmo’s, Comforts in 1986 (before moving into the building next door), the short-lived Tre Fratelli and then Cucina Jackson Fillmore in December 1998. When Cucina Jackson Fillmore moved down and across the street in 2003, the McNairs used the restaurant space in several different ways, including as a breakfast room for the Inn’s guests. Since 2014, the space has been leased to Valenti & Co., a popular Northern Italian restaurant and wine bar.

Thank you San Anselmo Inn for drawing visitors and welcoming them to our town!♦