Ayres Debuts Hawthorne Hotel
By SANDI CAIN
Costa Mesa-based Ayres Hotel Group opened its 16th hotel with its first in Los Angeles County last week.
The opening is part of a larger expansion and remodeling push by the family-owned hotel operator, which counts yearly revenue of about $30 million.
Ayres plans a third hotel in Corona and has plans to renovate seven others, including an expansion in Mission Viejo that already is under way.
The 175-room Ayres Hotel South Bay, at Rosecrans Avenue and Hindry Avenue near the San Diego (I-405) Freeway in Hawthorne, is in a redeveloped area of big retailers just a few miles south of Los Angeles International Airport.
The hotel was six years in the making. Doug Ayres, vice president of development and the designer of the company’s hotels, said Ayres walked away from the site a couple of times before deciding to go ahead in 2001.
“I saw the potential future growth in South Bay around the aerospace (and other) industries,” he said. “And I always felt we were lacking a hotel in a major metropolitan market.”
Ayres faces a lot of competition in the LAX area. As in other areas, the company’s strategy in Hawthorne is to go after business travelers with a European-style, midsize hotel.
Last year there were about 2,000 hotel rooms in Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, with the largest of those being the Manhattan Beach Marriott and Crowne Plaza Redondo Beach.
A 50-room Hawthorne Suites opened in Manhattan Beach last year. Holiday Inn Express and Hampton Inn opened in Hermosa Beach in 2002.
One nearby hotelier said the Ayres Hotel South Bay is expected to lure business travelers, especially those visiting El Segundo’s corridor of aerospace companies, which includes operations of Boeing Co., Northrop Grumman Corp., Raytheon Co. and the headquarters of Computer Sciences Corp.
The Ayres hotel includes space for meetings, including an upstairs terrace, an outdoor courtyard, two boardrooms and 8,000 square feet of banquet and other meeting space.
It’s also one of only a handful of hotels near LAX that aren’t in the airport’s flight path, according to regional director of sales Dana Meyer.
The South Bay hotel represents a homecoming of sorts for the family-owned business. Doug Ayres’ great-grandfather, Frank H. Ayres, started out as an early Los Angeles developer who helped create the neighborhood of Westchester near LAX in the 1940s. He also had a hand in extending Pico Boulevard from Los Angeles into Santa Monica in the early 1900s.
Next year the company Ayres will mark its centennial anniversary. Framed pictures from those early days of Los Angeles development are hung in public areas of the South Bay hotel.
“It was exciting for me to come back to a place near where my great-grandfather started,” Doug Ayres said.
He and twin brother Don Ayres III were born in Los Angeles. Doug Ayres attended the University of Southern California and worked in the sound and film industry for a time.
“I’ve always loved L.A.,” he said.
Ayres, a former commercial developer and homebuilder, switched to hotels in 1984. Its first hotels were in Cardiff by the Sea and Alpine, both in San Diego County. The first in Orange County was the Countryside Inn & Suites in Costa Mesa, now called Ayres Country Inn & Suites.
In OC, Ayres’ most recent venture is the 115-room Ayres Hotel in Seal Beach, which opened in 2002. Other OC hotels are in Anaheim, Orange, Laguna Woods, Mission Viejo and Yorba Linda. The company also has two hotels in Corona and three in Ontario.
