Sandbourne Santa Monica, Autograph Collection

Sandbourne Santa Monica opened at the end of May 2024 in the former Le Merigot, at 1740 Ocean Avenue, as Santa Monica's Autograph Collection entry. Icelandic designer Gulla Jónsdóttir reworked its 175 rooms and its double-height lobby around sand-and-sea materials, and the hotel runs a ceramics artist residency alongside Marelle, chef Raphael Lunetta's 187-seat Californian dining room.

The place

The hotel stands at 1740 Ocean Avenue, on the beach side of the street between Colorado Avenue and Pico Boulevard, a short walk south of the Santa Monica Pier and a block from the sand. Rooms are split between city-view and ocean-view categories, several with balconies.

The concept

Sandbourne is the reinvention of Le Merigot, the beachfront hotel that had occupied 1740 Ocean Avenue for years, reopened at the end of May 2024 under Marriott's Autograph Collection and folded into Crescent Hotels & Resorts' Latitudes lifestyle portfolio. Icelandic architect and designer Gulla Jónsdóttir took the building apart visually rather than structurally: her cues are water, sand, air and sun, worked into a double-height lobby of velvet and leather, rattan chairs shaped like birdcages, terracotta pots and heavy planting. The positioning is explicitly multisensory, and the clearest expression of it is a ceramics programme. A rotating group of artists is invited into residence to make pieces on site and show them around the property, and guests can join a 45-minute pinch-pot class by the pool led by a local ceramicist. The rest of the offer is more conventional for the address: a heated pool with cabanas, an on-site dog park, and 10,000 square feet of event space aimed at the wedding and corporate market that Ocean Avenue has always fed on.

Dining & wellness

Marelle is the hotel restaurant, a 187-seat room run by Santa Monica native chef Raphael Lunetta under Jónsdóttir's creative direction, cooking Californian food with a Mediterranean lean; it also runs a late-night happy hour with $10 plates. Poolside service comes from the Pool & Sunset Lounge, and the Lobby Bar handles the evening trade. On wellness, Crescent announced at opening that a full-service spa would follow the year after; the hotel's published offer still centres on the heated pool, its cabanas and in-room treatments rather than a spa floor.