Claremont Hotel & Spa

• 1. Introduction

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  The Claremont Resort and Club sits at 400 feet above sea level in the Berkeley Hills, its 160-foot wooden tower visible from across San Francisco Bay. It straddles the city limits of Berkeley and Oakland, with the border between those two cities running down what was once a train track. That right-of-way is now a footpath between tennis courts. A hotel that spans two cities, survived a firestorm, went bankrupt, changed hands multiple times, and once found itself unable to legally serve a glass of wine because of a university built a mile away. How did it get here? And why does any of it matter?

• 2. From Castle to Company

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  William Butler Thornburgh, an early settler from Jefferson County, West Virginia, built the first structure on this site around 1870. He called it a castle. Thornburgh died in 1878, and the property passed to John Ballard. Then, on the 14th of July 1901, a wildfire descended from the hills and burned the house to the ground.

  On the 10th of November 1905, Louis Titus acquired the land on behalf of the Claremont Hotel Company for approximately $37,500. Titus was not alone in this venture. His partners included John Hopkins Spring, Frank C. Havens, Duncan McDuffie, and Francis Smith, who went by the nickname Borax. Smith and Havens were already deep in the business of East Bay transit. They were among the forces behind the Key System, a transit and real estate company whose commuter trains had begun running in 1903.

  Construction started almost immediately after the 1905 purchase. It did not go smoothly. The 1906 earthquake disrupted supply chains and dried up financing. Work halted, resumed briefly in 1910, then stalled again. In November 1909, a referendum brought most of the hotel site into the city limits of Oakland. It was Erik Lindblom who finally put in enough money to push the project to completion in 1914. The hotel opened in 1915, timed to receive visitors crossing the bay to attend the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

• 3. A Wooden Giant

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  The Claremont was built in the Tudor Revival style, its exterior finished with exposed half-timber decorative work. That architectural choice had structural consequences. The building is made entirely of wood. At 160 feet, the central tower ranks among the tallest wooden buildings in the world.

  The hotel carries 279 guest rooms and a spa covering 20,000 square feet. The grounds extend across 22 acres of landscaped gardens, with 10 tennis courts occupying what were once open areas of the estate. The scale puts the Claremont in company with other grand California resort hotels of the same era, including the Mission Inn, completed in 1876; the Hotel del Coronado, from 1888; the St. Francis Hotel, from 1904; and the Fairmont Hotel, from 1907.

  A romantic story attached to the property claims it was once won in a checkers game. The hotel was nominated for listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 and was deemed eligible, but the owner objected, and the listing never happened. Oakland did designate it a City Historical Landmark, and it has belonged to Historic Hotels of America, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, since 2016.

• 4. The Liquor Problem

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  California passed a law in 1873 banning the sale of alcohol within two miles of the University of California. Three years later, in 1876, the legislature trimmed that exclusion zone to one mile from the university's perimeter. The Claremont, sitting just over the hill, fell inside that zone.

  By 1913, the hotel's investors had grown frustrated enough to push state legislation. They sponsored Assembly Bill 1620, known as the Ferguson bill. The bill was framed as a broader restriction on alcohol near churches and schools, but it contained a clause that specifically carved out the Claremont Hotel from the dry zone. Women's clubs and temperance groups in Berkeley mobilized against it. The Ferguson bill failed by one vote.

  Nationwide prohibition arrived on the 17th of January 1920, when the Volstead Act took effect under the 18th Amendment. When that amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment on the 5th of December 1933, the Claremont still could not legally pour a drink because the state's one-mile university rule remained on the books. Relief came in 1937, when the legislature changed how that distance was measured, switching from a straight line to the actual street route. That adjustment was enough. A student at the university had reportedly discovered in 1936 that the street route already exceeded a mile, and the hotel's website claims that student was rewarded with free drinks for life. That same calculation had been raised publicly back in 1913.

• 5. Trains, Tunnels, and Access

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  Claremont Hotel guests in the early years did not need to think much about getting to San Francisco. A Key System railway line, eventually designated the E line, ran from the Transbay Terminal across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and terminated just steps from the hotel's entrance, between what are now the Berkeley Tennis Club's courts. A guest could walk from the lobby directly onto a train headed across the bay.

  The Key System tracks were pulled up in 1958, along with the rest of the rail network. Before that happened, the Key System had also built a large hotel near downtown Oakland, the Key Route Inn, which similarly offered its own train service.

  Vehicular access followed a separate path. The Claremont sat on the main route through the Berkeley Hills via Claremont Canyon. In 1903, a small tunnel called the Inter County Tunnel was cut above Temescal Canyon, reached by a new road called Tunnel Road. That road initially ran from the end of Russell Street and was later re-routed to meet Ashby Avenue. The same corridor later served a larger tunnel, which opened in 1937 as the Broadway Low Level Tunnel and was eventually renamed the Caldecott Tunnel. The Claremont's street address is still 41 Tunnel Road, and that road is a designated segment of State Highway 13.

• 6. Changing Hands

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  Erik Lindblom, who had financed the hotel's completion, took ownership of the Claremont in 1918. He held it until 1937, when he sold it to Claude C. Gillum and his wife. Under the Gillums, the hotel's exterior was painted white. In 1954, they sold to the Harsh Investment Corporation, which leased operations to Murray Lehr. Lehr installed the first tennis courts and swimming pool on the property. Harsh took direct control in 1971 and continued reshaping the site, enclosing verandas that had been started under the Gillums and converting garden space into courts and parking.

  The 1991 Oakland firestorm reached the hotel's perimeter. Firefighters held the line, and a shift in the wind helped stop the flames short of the building. In 1998 the property was acquired by KSL Claremont Resort, Inc. Morgan Stanley purchased it in 2007. On the 1st of February 2011, the resort filed for bankruptcy, citing losses from the recession. Lenders including Paulson and Co., Winthrop Realty Trust, and Capital Trust foreclosed.

  By 2013, an agreement was in place to sell the Claremont along with three other properties to the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation. In March 2014, the Fairmont Hotel chain and financier Richard Blum bought the property for $86 million, rebranding it the Claremont Club and Spa, A Fairmont Hotel. In May 2023, Ohana Real Estate Investors acquired it for $163 million. On the 3rd of March 2025, the hotel departed the Fairmont group entirely and took its current name, the Claremont Resort and Club.

• 7. Berkeley Tennis Club

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  The Berkeley Tennis Club has occupied a corner of the Claremont's grounds for over a century. Starting in 1917, the club leased a section of the property southwest of the hotel. That arrangement ran for nearly three decades. In 1945, the club purchased that section outright and has remained at 1 Tunnel Road, Berkeley, directly beside the hotel.

  The border between Berkeley and Oakland runs along the former Key System E train right of way that now serves as a footpath between the club's courts. Most of the hotel's property, including the spa, the gardens, the parking area, and the hotel building itself, lies within Oakland. Two small parcels fall within Berkeley's city limits, one just east of the tennis club and another near the intersection of Claremont Avenue and Russell Street. The resort uses a mailing address in Berkeley, 41 Tunnel Road, Berkeley, though the hotel building stands in Oakland.