CH Projects Little Italy Hotel & Wellness Center

CH Projects, the San Diego restaurant and hospitality group behind The Guild Hotel and the Baby Grand, is planning its first ground-up hotel on a Little Italy corner it has spent years assembling. The 68-room project pairs guestrooms with an athletic club, a bathhouse-style wellness center and a public restaurant, but its timeline has repeatedly slipped behind a contested city approval process.

The place

The site sits at the northeast corner of Kettner Boulevard and West Juniper Street, at the northern edge of Little Italy where the neighborhood's restaurant-and-gallery blocks give way to the approach corridor for San Diego International Airport. CH Projects assembled the parcel through Inside Voice LLC, acquiring six properties on Kettner, Juniper and India Streets for roughly $13 million beginning in 2023 and later adding an adjoining lot on Kettner for $2.2 million. The site's position under the airport's flight path became the project's central obstacle: the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority denied the plans in February 2024 over crash-risk exposure to guests, a decision the San Diego City Council voted to override in July 2024.

The concept

Announced in February 2024, the project is CH Projects' first hotel built from the ground up, a departure from the adaptive-reuse model behind its two existing properties, The Guild Hotel (a converted YMCA) and the Baby Grand (a former motor inn in Coronado). The plan calls for 68 guestrooms alongside an athletic club, a bathhouse with sauna and steam facilities, and ground-floor restaurant and retail space, extending the wellness positioning CH Projects has built across its portfolio. As of August 2026, the project remains in the city's development review process rather than under construction. Co-founder Arsalun Tafazoli said in early 2026 that he was hoping city permits would be issued by June 2026, which would allow groundbreaking by August 2026; no independent reporting has confirmed that either milestone was met, and no construction start has been publicly documented.

Dining & wellness

The hotel's dining program is planned around three venues: Night Hawk, a roughly 6,000-square-foot restaurant built around modern Greek and seafood cooking; Fallen Empire, a reservations-only Champagne and oyster bar; and a third, still-unnamed omakase restaurant slated to follow. All three are designed to operate as public-facing venues open to non-guests, consistent with CH Projects' restaurant-led approach at its other properties.