Motels are having a moment

In 2022, Lisa Lennox was visiting a friend in Stephenville, Texas, when she stumbled upon the Interstate Inn. The motel, on a highway an hour west of Fort Worth, had seen better days. The building was notorious with local police, and rooms rented for $40 a night. The property needed new plumbing and wiring, and asbestos had to be removed.

But Lennox immediately felt a connection to the property, with its funky design, including a giant sloped roof that screamed Space Age.

“These motels are very Americana,” she said. “They’ve got a really unique design. But they’re all in disrepair, and a lot of them are being torn down.” Lennox had no real experience in hospitality, but she’d traveled widely and knew what made a good hotel room. She bought the motel that year, took an online hotel management course at Cornell University and plans to open a renovated 35-room Interstate Inn, as well as another motel, with her siblings by the end of September. A third opening is planned for next year.

Lennox and her siblings are not alone: Motels are having a moment. Kimberly Walker, managing partner at Nomada Hotel Group, which owns three motels in California, says she sees a rise in what she calls “motel culture.” It includes people who are interested in owning and renovating motels, as well as travelers — especially young people — with an affinity for them.

In recent years, the humble roadside motel that an older generation might dismiss as outmoded at best has begun to appeal to a new group of younger fans, attracted to hit-the-road adventures. Instagram pages celebrating zany motel designs have hundreds of thousands of followers. The award-winning sitcom “Schitt’s Creek,” which takes place largely in a motel setting, has a cult following.

And streaming services, such as Max, have programs devoted to motel renovation. These programs became especially popular during the pandemic, when cooped-up viewers began dreaming of do-it-yourself projects.

The pandemic also changed how travelers viewed motels. A lot of homebound people craved a getaway after being shut up for so long, and motels, which afforded more privacy than many hotels, felt safer healthwise, Walker said. Outward-facing rooms meant guests didn’t have to walk through a crowded lobby or share an elevator to get to their cars. Many properties built more recently have private outdoor spaces.

Motels — the word is a portmanteau of “motor” and “hotel” — boomed after the Interstate System was built in the 1950s and ’60s. At their peak, in 1964, more than 61,000 motels operated in the United States, said Mark Okrant, the author of “No Vacancy: The Rise, Demise and Reprise of America’s Motels.”

Many motels were small, family-owned, one- or two-story places that tended to serve as quick stopovers for motorists. By the 1990s, as many as half were owned by Sikh immigrants, part of what was coined “the Patel motel cartel.”

These places offered convenience and comfort. Guests could park right outside their rooms, check in at the front desk and recover from their travels before moving on. The interiors were typically simple: A couple of beds, a desk, a television and, perhaps, a chair or two. Glamorous, they were not.

By 2012, only 16,000 motels remained in the United States, and a lot of them were struggling to stay in business. The children and grandchildren of the immigrant owners often had little interest in what could be a grueling business, Lennox said. More mom-and-pop motels were replaced by big hotel chains, such as Motel 6 and the Holiday Inn.

But it’s the unique and charming aesthetic of roadside motels that are helping them become relevant again.

When the Nomada Group purchased the Skyview in Los Alamos, California, for $1.9 million in 2016, it was so rundown and forbidding that locals likened it to the Bates Motel in the movie “Psycho.” But it had 360-degree views of the wine country and a quirky, bright yellow road sign right out of the Rat Pack days.

The company, which has outside investors, spent $3 million to overhaul the 33-room property. That included opening a restaurant, the Norman, where guests could dine on Bates burgers. It also included moving the parking lot and replacing it with a large communal space containing Adirondack chairs and a fire pit. The property has a rustic California feel, with a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees and spiky agave plants. Inside are a lot of midcentury modern-style features, like turquoise-blue bubble lamps and a hutch with a record player.

The Skyview was closed during the pandemic, but once California lifted its COVID-19 restrictions in June 2021, business was brisk, even on weekdays. A lot of the guests were working remotely and eager for a getaway, Walker said.

In Saratoga Springs, New York, the Downtowner was an aging family-owned motel with “tasteful, but dated” decor that attracted guests looking for a “basic,” inexpensive place to stay, said Rob Blood, CEO of Massachusetts-based Lark Hotels, which operates nine motels under the Bluebird by Lark brand.

Blood’s company, which operates old inns in places like Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Portland, Maine, bought the property for $4.25 million in 2018. Business was tepid at first, Blood said, until the company turned it into a boutique hotel with a sleek, midcentury modern look. Its gallery-white walls are filled with arty photos of famous writers such as Alice Walker and Carson McCullers, who once stayed at the Yaddo artists’ retreat nearby.

The Downtowner became the Spa City Motor Lodge, to emphasize its motel origins. Blood believes the changes helped turn business around at the 42-room property, in part by attracting a lot of younger guests.

“Some people shy away from the word ‘motel,’ because it has a connotation of Super 8 and Motel 6,” Blood said. “But the Brooklyn crew is not afraid of a good motel,” he said referring to what he calls “young hipsters.”

The designs are appealing to roadside adventurers looking for a place to spend the night.

At Lennox’s Interstate Inn, one room has a water bed and a black velvet headboard. She also found a Magic Fingers bed, which vibrates when you put a quarter in the slot. Such beds were commonplace in motels in the 1960s and ’70s, but they had fallen out of favor by the ’80s.

Lennox said she hoped that when guests visited the Interstate Inn, they would say, “‘Oh, I love the mermaid drinking Champagne,’ or ‘I love the Sputnik wallpaper.’” She said that she wanted people to stay in a different room each time.

Touches like that can be a big hit in the Instagram age, said Lindsey Kurowski, the host of “Motel Rescue,” a television series about motel renovation on the Magnolia Network.

But getting the low-cost look of a motel can be deceptively expensive. Old motels can be full of maintenance issues. Many mid-20th century motels have small rooms and tiny bathrooms with stall showers, and converting the rooms into the kind of interiors contemporary travelers want can require stripping them down to the studs and even moving walls, said Rod Clough, president of HVS Americas, a consulting firm for the hospitality industry.

“When we see these neat projects where they’re bringing something back to life, there tends to be a group behind it that has incredibly deep pockets,” he said.

The motels may need new roofs and wiring. Many have single-paned windows that must be replaced with double panes to muffle outside sounds. “A lot of these motels were built on busy streets that weren’t so busy back then, and now they’re even busier,” Clough said.

Rising construction costs and higher interest rates have also recently slowed new deals to a trickle, just as motels are starting to appear again along American highways.

Still, the pandemic changed how a lot of people traveled, long after a virus is a top concern on a trip.

Many people, like Maggie Burke, who once avoided motels, have changed their minds. When Burke used to travel for work, she never considered staying in a motel. They had seedy associations of illicit assignations and hourly rates, she said.

“I would kind of look at the cars as I went zooming past, and think, ‘Oh, my God, who goes there?’ ” she said.

But last New Year’s Eve, her husband surprised her with a trip to the Alander, a newly restored roadside motel with its own restaurant in Ancram, New York.

Today, the couple is building a house in the area and regularly stay at the property. A hotel might offer more amenities, Burke said, but she has discovered she likes the quiet comfort and simplicity of a motel.

“You just come and go — you’re not disturbing anyone,” she said. “It’s become our new destination.”

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