A historic hotel and saloon in Northern California's Lake County has been sold by its longtime owners.
Bernie and Lynne Butcher, a former San Francisco couple who owned a home on nearby Clear Lake, bought the 17-room Tallman Hotel in 2003. They set about restoring the property, which was built in 1896 and operated alongside a meetinghouse called the Blue Wing Saloon until Prohibition, when the region's wine-growing economy went bust. The property had been vacant since the early 1960s until the Butchers converted it into a modern hotel.
Amar and Rajvi Alapati of the Alapati Hospitality Group purchased the hotel for $1.8 million, or roughly $106,000 per key, according to CoStar data. The Alapatis own a handful of other boutique hotels around Northern California, including the Amador Hotel in Pioneer, the Groveland Hotel and Narrow Gauge Inn near Yosemite National Park, and the Shaver Lake Village Hotel in the Sierras.
“We’ve put our heart and soul over the past 20 years into creating a first-class, memorable hospitality destination,” Bernie Butcher said in a press release from CBRE, which facilitated the transaction.
The property's history as pieced together by the Butchers goes back to the 1870s, when Rufus and Mary Tallman built a stage stop hotel and saloon in Upper Lake as a way station for travelers heading to nearby Clear Lake’s famous mineral hot springs or on to Sacramento. That establishment burned down and was rebuilt by the couple's daughter and her husband, who also opened the Blue Wing Saloon next door, but that was torn down during Prohibition in the 1920s. The hotel became a boardinghouse and then a retirement home before closing in 1962.
When the Butchers bought it some 40 years later, the hotel's roof and foundation were literally crumbling, according to a 2015 story in SFGate. It reopened in 2006 along with a new Blue Wing Saloon serving upscale food and drinks. The hotel features a swimming pool, gardens and a meeting room. Select rooms are outfitted with outdoor showers and Japanese ofuro soaking tubs, according to the press release.
The hotel is also the site of the annual Blue Wing Blues Festival. It is a few miles from Clear Lake, the state's largest natural freshwater lake, and Lake County is home to a burgeoning winery scene and miles of hiking and mountain biking trails.
The State Historical Resources Commission named the Tallman Hotel a California point of historical interest in 2008.
For the record
CBRE’s Alex Lee-Bull and Lauren Liebes represented the seller.