Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa
Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa (also known as the Grand Californian) is a hotel located in Anaheim, California. In 2001, the hotel was built as part of a major expansion of the Disneyland Resort. The Walt Disney Company designed and operated it. The motel was built in the American Craftsman architectural style. It also has a Disney Vacation Club wing, which debuted on September 23, 2009. There is a special access to Disney California Adventure Park from the hotel. The rooms and lobby were renovated by Disney in 2017.
4240 Architecture Inc. architect Peter Dominick designed the hotel (formerly part of Urban Design Group Inc.). It includes 948 rooms, as well as 44 suites and 71 villas.
Craftsman style buildings frequently feature garden themes, which inspired Peter Dominick to create the hotel’s woodland motif. The reception hall is based on the inside of San Francisco’s Swedenborgian Church, but scaled up to suit the massive welcome desk. The central lobby is designed as a living room, complete with a massive fireplace, vast arching rafters overhead, and chairs and sofas set around little coffee tables.
Many of the things found around the hotel were handcrafted by modern Arts and Crafts practitioners, and some early Roycroft artifacts are on exhibit in the foyer.
Some of the hotel’s rooms pay homage to Craftsman-era architects and designers including Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie MacKintosh, and the Gladding, McBean Company.
It takes its name from Disney’s Grand Floridian Property & Spa, its sister resort and the premier resort hotel of Walt Disney World. The two hotels do not share themes, however, as the Grand Californian is a Craftsman-style hotel while the Grand Floridian is a Victorian-style hotel. It does, however, share many thematic elements with Disney’s Wilderness Lodge (also designed by Dominick) with its Walt Disney World national park lodge theming.
The 2.5-acre (10,000-square-meter) south-side extension adds more than 200 hotel rooms and 50 two-bedroom comparable vacation villas, as well as the West Coast debut of Disney Vacation Club, the company’s vacation ownership program. During this enlargement and renovation, a swimming pool and a 300-space underground parking garage were added. The enormous extension was planned by Peter Dominick of 4240 Architecture Inc., the architect for the original Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa. It is designed in the same California Arts & Crafts style as the old hotel, immersing guests in a turn-of-the-century California experience. In September 2009, the project was completed.
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