Step inside The Darling. Visalia hotel has Art Deco design, rooftop bar and Sierra views

There is some irony in calling a 1930s Art Deco building the Darling Hotel.

From the outside, the 32-room boutique hotel that opened this month on Court Street in downtown Visalia is anything but. During the day, the five-story building is stark white and seems to loom over the street. 

At night, it lights up like something out of L.A. noir. 

“The irony is that the building itself is kind of masculine,” says Matt Ainley, one of the hotel’s owners who helped design and renovate the building.

“The exterior architecture is pretty breathtaking,” he says.

Historic Tulare County building renovated

The building originally opened in 1935 and served as an annex to the Tulare County courthouse and part of the old courthouse square. The courthouse itself was demolished in 1952 after being damaged in an earthquake, but the annex continued to be used by the county until 2008. 

It sat vacant for close to a decade before Ainley and a group of investors bought the building from the county in 2018 for somewhere around $2 million, he says. They spent the next 20 months on renovations — included building a rooftop restaurant lounge, called the Elderwood, a patio garden and vintage-looking courtyard with a pool that sits off Court Street.

“Everything was stripped to the bones and brought back,” Ainley says. 

The building’s plumbing, electrical and HVAC units are all new, even as much of the original interior architecture remains — especially in the main downstairs lobby, with its high ceiling and polished terrazzo floor. 

Where it was possible, the building’s original woodwork — panels, doors and stair rails — were kept and repurposed. It’s visible, if not immediately noticeable inside the Elderwood restaurant. 

Hyper local and Easter eggs to find

One wouldn’t suspect the restaurant was a completely new addition, built in what used to be the building’s mechanical room. 

The hotel’s two executive suites once served as chambers for the county board of supervisors and the rooms — dubbed the green room and the blue room — still have the original mahogany doors, built-in alcoves and windows. The clawfoot tub in the bathroom is new, though appropriately vintage.

The doors on the elevators — brown with hand-painted gold lettering — are original, though the elevator’s electronics have been updated with new numbers pads, Ainley says.

The overall aesthetic is era appropriate and also hyper local. 

Throughout the hotel, the walls are lined with vintage-looking topographical maps and paintings of wildlife from the region. There are also old photographs, including some of Ainley’s own family. 

If you look hard enough, you’ll find a rare photo of the building when it was still connected to the courthouse. There is also a framed set of the building’s architectural schematics from the 1930s. 

It’s just a copy, though Ainley does have the originals at home. 

“There’s little things like that: Little Easter eggs for you to find,” Ainley says.

Outdoor rooftop dining during pandemic

The hotel should have been open earlier this year. 

The plan had been a grand opening in March or April, but that was put on hold as the initial wave of the coronavirus pandemic hit. 

The eventual opening happened July 1, the same day Gov. Gavin Newsom directed many counties, including Tulare County, to shut down restaurants for indoor dining. The news left the hotel’s restaurant scrambling for a workaround for those waiting with reservations. 

“It was like 10 days of solid booking,” Ainley says.

“We had three or four hours to make adjustments.”

Luckily, two-thirds of the restaurant’s seating is outside, one of two rooftop patios. This allows the restaurant to remain open, with reservations. There are large umbrellas and swamp coolers to keep diners chill during the summer days, and reservations for morning and evening meals continue to be full.

The restaurant has a seasonal menu of appetizers, salads and entrees — like braised prime short ribs — and specialty craft cocktails, like a passion fruit-infused rum drink made with yunnan black tea, lychee and Elderwood house lemonade.

It’s called the Parnold Almer.

Guests also can go traditional and get an Old Fashioned or New York Sour.

National parks visits or staycations

Eventually, the hotel expects to draw business travelers and those passing through on vacations to the national parks and the like. 

For now, the focus remains local. 

The hotel is targeting staycationers, people coming in from Visalia or surrounding cities, to sustain them through the worst of the pandemic. 

“There’s been a lot of delayed anniversaries and birthday parties,” Ainley says. 

“There’s a lot of parent who could use a night out, away from the kids.”

While it has been a struggle, the hotel and restaurant brought 70 new jobs to Visalia at a time when they were needed, Ainley says. And opening a business amid a national crisis isn’t new to Ainley. He also runs an engineering firm, which opened during the great recession. 

While it’s far from ideal, those struggles can ultimately work to your favor, he says.

“It forces you to stay lean and really figure out your business model.”

This story was originally published July 22, 2020 at 10:58 AM.