The Madonna Inn is more than just a stop-over on the famous Highway One, which meanders along the Pacific coast in California from Los Angeles via Santa Barbara and Monterey to San Francisco.
Behind Pismo Beach, the road loops away from the sea, because there are several mountains and the two reactor blocks of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant have to be bypassed. The route continues as Highway 101 through the village of San Luis Obispo.
Until one sees a lock-like entrance gate on the left hand side that involuntarily puts on the brakes: It is the driveway to the craziest motel in the state: the Madonna Inn, an institution since the late 1950s. Even if you don’t have to or don’t want to stay there, you should at least take a break in the restaurant – and go to the toilets. But more on that later.
Madonna Inn: The pink Palace
Guests are overwhelmed by this mish-mash of styles, a nightmare in pink. If you want to spend the night in the hotel with the Disney-like interior design of a Snow White coffin, you will be spoiled for choice between 110 different rooms.
The name has nothing religious, nor any connection to the singer of the same name, but rather reminds of the founders of this accommodation. “Most accommodations offer the guests as little as possible and charge a high price for it,” said Alex Madonna, who founded the hotel in 1958. “We want exactly the opposite and don’t offer our guests the kind of desolate environment that can be found in most beachside motels.”
In the caves of the monkey planet Mongo
No office of a well-known interior designer designed the house with its extensions, but some rooms are the result of spontaneous creations. The “Cave Man” room was created in just six hours on a Saturday afternoon. “We didn’t do it according to plan, we just did it out of feeling,” said Alex Madonna.
There are months of waiting for certain suites. The Inn is particularly popular with wedding couples. You can tell the age of the building in some corners. But you are going on a journey back in time, back to the 50s and 60s.
You shouldn’t miss the walk to the men’s room in the basement, which some women also have a look into. The washroom looks like a grotto with its giant clams that serve as hand basins. “The urine is a chimney carved into the rock, but when the urine stream (sorry, but it has to be explained) touches the floor, water gushes out of the walls of the smoke flap and cascades down,” writes Umberto Eco. “As if it were the flushing in the caves of the monkey planet Mongo.”
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