Nob Hill’s Huntington Hotel closes after mortgage default

A historic hotel on Nob Hill near Union Square in San Francisco has closed after not paying its mortgage.

The luxury Huntington Hotel at 1075 California Street faces foreclosure and has shut down “until further notice,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing real estate filings and the hotel’s website.

The 135-room hotel is in default on its mortgage of $56.2 million, according to a notice filed Aug. 16 with the San Francisco County Assessor-Recorder’s Office. The lender, the New York branch of Deutsche Bank, is seeking to foreclose on the loan, the notice says.

The hotel owed $61.1 million, including interest and late fees, as of Aug. 8, according to the default notice, “and will increase until your account becomes current.”

The hotel and its Big 4 Restaurant and Nob Hill Spa remain closed until further notice, according to the hotel’s website. Google lists the hotel as “temporarily closed.”

The hotel is owned by Woodridge Capital Partners, based in Los Angeles, which bought it from Grace International of Singapore in September 2018 for an undisclosed price. Grace International had owned it since 2011 and rebranded it as the Scarlet Huntington.
Woodridge Capital did not respond to requests for comment by the Chronicle.

The 12-story Huntington Hotel, built in 1924, was named after Collis Huntington, one of the Big Four industrial magnates of the era who also included Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker.

The Big 4 Restaurant harkens back to those Central Pacific Railroad tycoons, who built mansions on gilded Nob Hill where Hopkins also had a hotel named after him.

Woodridge Capital has a history of buying and selling Nob Hill hotels, in conjunction with Oaktree Capital Management, based in Los Angeles.

In 2012, they bought the Fairmont San Francisco for $200 million, then sold it three years later to a South Korean investor for $450 million.

In late 2014, they paid $120 million for the 383-room Mark Hopkins Hotel across the street, which they sold in 2017 to a Hong Kong investor for nearly $206 million.

In 2014, Michaeil Rosenfeld and his Woodbridge Capital bought the nearby 393-room Stanford Court Hotel for an undisclosed price. It reopened in February, after being closed two years during the coronavirus pandemic.

San Francisco tourism has started to bounce back after the pandemic decimated the city’s hotel market. It’s unclear if Huntington had resumed normal operations during the pandemic.

— Dana Bartholomew