4. Post Ranch Inn
Historic coastal resort rooted in rich history of Big Sur
In 1848, an 18-year-old with wanderlust left Connecticut with vague plans to go west. After sailing around Cape Horn, William Brainard Post stepped off a ship in Monterey and immediately did two things.
First, he got a job at the Monterey Whaling Station, where men burned whale blubber into lamp oil and harvested bones for corsets.
Next, he fell in love. Within two years of his arrival, Post wed Anselma Onesimo, an American Indian from Carmel Valley whose father helped build the Carmel Mission where the young couple got married.
Their 640-acre hog and cattle ranch was one of the first homesteads in Big Sur, a center of the community with feasts that lasted for days, where they raised generations of children to work and respect the rugged wilderness. Nearly a century and a half later, their great-grandson Billy Post singlehandedly excavated 100 of those acres with a tractor to create one of the world’s most popular ecological hotels, Post Ranch Inn.
Perched 1,200 feet above the booming surf, Post intentionally designed his retreat to coexist with nature, not chopping down a single redwood tree and hiring local architects and artists to create guest rooms with renewable and recycled materials. He enlisted architect Mickey Muennig, known for creating the characteristic Big Sur non-linear redwood and glass “organic architecture” aesthetic, to create tree houses on 9-foot stilts as well as cantilevered cliff suites. Walls of glass look out over dramatic stretches of coastline where fog, sunsets and whales glide by. Many of the rooms have curved beam roofs, covered with grass and wildflowers, and were among the first living roofs in the United States.
The 40 guesthouses were designed to blend in to the coastline, fed by solar power and built with repurposed winebarrel-wood walls and recycled Corten steel. Old metal public-school doors were used for the entrances. The sinks inside were handcrafted by local ceramicists, the bubinga wood furniture and cabinetry is handbuilt on the property, the lavender soap comes from a local farm, and the rugs are hand-woven by indigenous weavers. Heat comes from woodburning stoves.
From his studio a mile down the road, painter and sculptor Greg Hawthorne made the Picassoesque chairs and tables found throughout the property, as well as the metal sculpture of faces in profile at the entrance to Post Ranch Inn.
“Bill and I got an idea to start a small inn, because at the time there wasn’t anything in Big Sur honoring the legacy of his family,” said Mike Freed, the managing partner.
“There were the parks named after Pfeiffer and Molera, and a few ranches left with family names, but nothing to remember Post.”
Post Ranch Inn opened in 1992, with each room named after a Big Sur pioneer.
Descendants of the namesakes were invited to stay over the first night. Local historian and Post Ranch event planner Soaring Starkey gathered archival photos and oral histories, and framed a biography of each pioneer for each room. Anselma and William B. Post were obvious choices, but also named are such notable characters as Sam Trotter, Big Sur’s larger-thanlife turn-of-the-century home builder; Thomas Slate, who founded Slate’s Hot Springs near what is today the Esalen Institute; and Elizabeth Gilkey, who married into the Post family and eschewed housework for hunting, and was known for shooting any mountain lion that encroached on her pigs or goats.
When the Post Ranch Inn first opened, guests paid $450 a night. Within five months, Post Ranch Inn made the cover of Travel + Leisure magazine. “We’ve been full ever since,” Freed said.
This year, Travel + Leisure named Post Ranch Inn one of the world’s best hotels. So did Conde Nast and Forbes Traveler. Luxury Travel magazine named it one of the world’s 10 best cliff-side hotels. And these days, the average room rate is $1,500.
Guests are paying for serenity, privacy and attention to eco-detail. There are massage tables in every room, and a full menu of bodywork services at the spa. Included in the room price are complimentary yoga and meditation classes, guided nature hikes, garden tours, and nightly stargazing through a 12-inch Meade telescope, one of the largest hotel telescopes in the country.
Each building has a secluded entrance and is surrounded by a canopy of old-growth redwood trees so visitors can move from their rooms to the infinity pool to the hiking trails in solitude.
There are no plastic bottles anywhere on the property; instead, visitors fill glass bottles with chlorine-free filtered water. They can use steel water bottles for hikes. The only television is in the library.
“This is the show,” Freed said, sweeping his arm toward the fog rolling in over the wide expanse of blue ocean.
Executive chef John Cox at Sierra Mar restaurant at Post Ranch Inn is at the forefront of sustainable kitchens. He rigged up an air compressor to blow food off dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, which he estimates saves him 1,000 gallons of water a day. Restaurants and major companies are inquiring about his invention, he said, and he also dreams of coming up with a consumer model.
His menu pays tribute to the ancestry of the Post family, using acorn flour ground from California white oak trees in his breads, along with herbs and wildflowers picked from the sod roofs on site. He forages from the Post Ranch Inn vegetable garden and the sea, and uses honey from Post Ranch Inn beehives.
“I work with the Monterey Abalone Co. guys, and they can get some really interesting things for me sometimes, like moon jellies and keyhole limpets,” Cox said.
On a recent visit to Sierra Mar restaurant, he brought his latest inventions to the table: pickled yucca flowers and a syrup made from roasting and smoking the spiky parts of the yucca underground for several days. By drying and grinding Cabernet grape husks into flour, he made a red-hued bread with a light wine flavor.
Billy Post lived on the property with his wife, Luci, until his death in 2009. She died in 2011. They were among Cox’s best customers.
When he became frail, Post bought a Segway to move around the property and talk to guests. Post could be found every morning on the deck of Sierra Mar restaurant having breakfast with visitors, telling Big Sur old-timer stories. He entertained them with tales of pack trips on horseback into the wilderness, three-day cattle drives to Monterey and raccoon hunts.
Today, his framed photo is among those assembled into a family tree on the lobby wall. Right there, three rows down from William B. and Anselma.
“Bill and I got an idea to start a small inn. ... There wasn’t anything in Big Sur honoring the legacy of his family.”
Mike Freed, managing partner