The very first hotel rooms that were built years ago at Harrah’s Resort Southern California are getting a $24 million top-to-bottom makeover that the resort hopes will invoke the feel of a Southern California beach retreat.
The renovation, which began in October and is expected to be completed by next summer, is the first upgrade since 2007 when the 203 rooms in what is known as the Dive Inn tower were last redone. All the rooms in the tower, a portion of which wraps around the Valley Center resort’s pool, will remain closed until the project is complete.
Harrah’s, though, has plenty of other rooms — 884 more — to accommodate guests during the closure. Among local casino resorts, it has the single largest number of rooms, and its hotel property ranks among the largest lodging destinations in the county.
Over the last several years, the Rincon tribe, which owns Harrah’s, has been upgrading the resort, most recently adding Gordon Ramsay’s 332-seat Hell’s Kitchen restaurant, which replaced the resort’s former buffet venue that shuttered during the pandemic.
“We have to have a competitive product and we will always work to improve the amenities we have to make sure we’re the resort of choice,” said Beau Swanson, vice president of marketing for the resort. “You have to reinvest in your product to maintain that, and this is one part of it. We’re always working on new ideas to expand our resort amenities.”
The guestrooms, which range in size from 489 to 1,467 square feet (for a suite) are being stripped to the shell and entirely reinvented with a palette of creamy beiges and bright blues, in a nod to the Southern California beach scene and the resort’s adjacent pool. Even the carpet, with its abstract design of striped shades of blue, was chosen, Swanson says, to “reflect the surf, so it almost looks like the ocean surf coming into the beach.”
Larger, 55-inch screen TVs are being installed, and the bathrooms will be enlarged to accommodate much bigger, contemporary showers.
Unrelated to the guestroom renovations, Harrah’s is preparing to open before Christmas a new fast casual 24-hour restaurant called Corner Counter that will be serving Italian cuisine, including focaccia-style pizza by the slice, sandwiches, pasta and gelato. It is taking the place of the former smoothie outlet, Robeks. Another new outlet coming to Harrah’s is Best of Cluck, a quick-serve chicken concept that will be adjacent to Hell’s Kitchen.
The two additions will bring Harrah’s total number of restaurants to nine.
The resort’s accommodations have steadily grown over the year, beginning with the Dive Inn Tower in 2002, followed by the Resort Tower South in 2004, when the Rincon band spent $168 million on a new 459-room hotel tower, parking garage and spa, and an expansion of the pool area.
A decade later it invested an additional $160 million on still more rooms — the 21-story Resort Tower North, which added 403 guest rooms and a 53,000-square-foot convention and entertainment venue with concert-style seating. In 2016, 22 more guestrooms were added to that tower, in addition to an in-house brewery and four meeting rooms that were built on the resort. Also part of that project was a new swim-up bar and a 400-foot-long “lazy river” pool, which circulates through grottos and waterfalls.