We’re 20 years old!

Celebrating 20 years as the Brewery Gulch Inn

A recent evening after the rain, with all the colors around the inn exploding.

Hey!! It’s our birthday! This March, the Brewery Gulch Inn has completed 20 whole revolutions around the sun, learning and stretching with each yearly turn into what and who we are today. Most days we just trundle along, looking to see how we can make each individual day, week, or year the best possible experience for our steadily growing family of returning guests (who are now really more friends than anything else) – we don’t usually stop to think about how long we’ve been at this. So it was sort of a special moment when we looked at the calendar and realized, “Wow! The inn is turning 20 this year! We’ve been doing this for a while!” True, there are many inns of longer standing along the coast, but that doesn’t stop us from feeling more than a little bit proud of ourselves for these 20 years of ours.

Original owner Arky Ciancutti with the sinker logs used to build the inn. Photo courtesy of Arky.

Arky Ciancutti, the original owner and mastermind that got it all started, reminisces about the beginnings of the inn…

I first came out to Mendocino back in the 70s when Don & Hazel Dennen brought me up from the Bay Area to lead teamwork training for all of their managers and staff at the Heritage House. They introduced me to the life around Mendocino – and what a wild kind of a place Mendocino was in those days!  I fell in love with the beauty of the coast and bought a quiet old farmhouse with my wife and kids. In 1983, I started to pursue the permits I would need to expand our house and make it into a 10-bedroom inn. Then the undeveloped piece of property right next to mine came up for sale, and I decided to buy it and build a brand new inn on it instead of expanding my own house. In the meantime, family business took us back to the Bay Area, but we didn’t want to sell our farmhouse, so we turned it into a little bed and breakfast for a few years, the first iteration of the Brewery Gulch Inn – and Raquel, your head housekeeper now, was our first employee. Altogether, it took 16 years of constant work to get all the proper permits and designs before we could start building the inn. At last, in 1999, my wife Francesca & I broke ground on the site where the inn now stands today.

What a team that was that developed that place! Local woodworkers, innkeepers, architects, builders, and artisans all contributed key ideas to the overall design. The visual aspect of the design mainly centered around the wood, those old redwood sinker logs that I had dredged up from the bottom of Big River. We wanted to create a place that both showcased the beauty of this unique lumber and also blended seamlessly with the view and landscape around it. And because we milled the wood right in front of the building site, we were able to hand pick each piece as we needed it, making adjustments and tweaks as we went to make sure it all came out perfect. That is in large part why the inn feels so comfortable – I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere else that just feels so right, like it belongs exactly where it is and you being there puts you in harmony with the world around you.

The inn was such a fun project to get started, and it turned out even better than I could have imagined when I began the whole process back in the 80s. Take those giant doors in the Great Room for example. I had no idea you could make doors that big and have them come out beautiful! And then selling the inn to Guy was probably the best thing I ever did for Brewery Gulch – he took what I started and really refined it. He leads all his staff really well, he has a good head for what the guest experience should be like, and he is more forward thinking than I ever was with regards to all those computers and things. He took all the best things I put on the table and just improved on it. Continues to improve upon it even!

Head housekeeper Raquel Huerta with her husband, who has often lent a helping hand around the inn, and one of their newest grandbabies. Photo courtesy of Raquel

Raquel, who has been the head housekeeper at the Brewery Gulch Inn since the doors opened in 2001, remembers how everything was when she started working for Arky down in the farmhouse in the late 90s…

When a friend first approached me and told me about an opening as housekeeper in a little B&B, I said, “No way! I don’t want to work in a hotel!” Somehow she convinced me though, brought me out to Arky’s farmhouse to show me around, and then told me, “Alright! You start tomorrow!” I was a little shocked, but I stayed. As I worked there, I kept hearing rumors among the innkeepers and Arky that they were going to build a big inn up on the bluff above the farmhouse, but it all just seemed like a dream because it was hidden from sight up there. When the inn was almost finished, Glen, who was the manager at the time, came to find me where I was working in the farmhouse and convinced me to become the head housekeeper. I brought in all my family to help move things into the new building – uncles, brothers, cousins, sisters – it was almost like a big family event getting it all set up and ready to go.

For one reason and another, I’ve stayed on ever since then. I like working for Guy, because he’s always here, taking care of things, and I guess this place and the people here just feel kind of like home by now.

Current owners Guy, Sarah, & Ella Pacurar having a little family fun on a quiet day at the inn

Guy, who bought the inn in 2007, weighs in too with some reminiscing on his own journey with the Brewery Gulch Inn…

I first wanted to buy an inn because I enjoyed going with my parents to a place in Palm Springs where the owners made everyone feel like a part of their family – they made us feel at home. I had never been to or even heard of Mendocino before I saw the inn listed online and decided to come up and look at it. I had never really liked staying at B&B’s before because they always felt like you were being forced to socialize. This place had the right kind of space to be by yourself if you wanted to or meet other guests if you felt like it. It also had a more contemporary feel than other places; Arky had done an amazing job of situating the inn on the property; and the architect had so perfectly crafted the way you enter the inn, coming in through the lobby to the great room, with the ceiling soaring up over your head and the light pouring in through the great glass doors… it was special seeing it for the first time.

The inn cast its spell over me that first time I walked through the doors, and I love that I get to keep refining an environment that allows the inn to do the same thing for each new person that steps across our threshold. Of course, I also love getting to hang out with the family we’ve created here, both with staff and guests, and making new friends every day. My favorite moments are when a guest comes to get coffee or even order breakfast in their bathrobe – I know we’ve achieved our object of making that person feel at home. On the other hand, my worst fear is seeing a guest come down the stairs in their underwear, at which point we’ve gone too far with the whole homey feeling! In all seriousness though, I think the inn has proven to be a wonderful refuge from the hectic pace of daily life these past 20 years, and I look forward to many more years of continuing to provide that quiet escape that we all need more often than we realize.

Hear! Hear! So as we look back and celebrate these first 20 years, let’s give a big cheer for the next 20 years to come!

We are so ready for 20 more years of enjoying this view…

Words and some pictures by Laura Hockett