The owners of popular Santa Rosa restaurant The Spinster Sisters had nearly completed their improbable, top-to-bottom restoration of the long-blighted Astro Motel when wildfires bore down on Sonoma County. “It happened so fast,” recalls Liza Hinman, the chef and co-owner of the Spinster Sisters and now a proprietor of the nearby hotel. “People had to jump into action.”
She did. The city granted temporary occupancy at the Astro, and within days Hinman had her first guests: Fire evacuees and recovery effort volunteers filling 30 rooms. Now, with evacuation orders lifted and the Tubbs Fire 100 percent contained as of yesterday, the Astro has qualified as a FEMA Emergency Lodging Assistance Property, meaning the disaster relief organization will cover room costs for qualified fire survivors.
Meanwhile, the hotel is also open to the public, anxiously awaiting the typical harvest season tourists who make up a staple of the local economy. In that way, the Astro might be emblematic of Sonoma and Napa in this moment of fire recovery: Their efforts are split between caring for locals who have suffered losses and attracting tourists whose financial support is more valuable than ever.
“Sonoma County and Napa county have really suffered a blow because tourists have an impression that this is a fire-devastated area and isn’t open for business — which isn't the case,” Hinman says. “I’m standing in the heart of wine country at my kids’ school right now and it couldn’t be more beautiful.”
The recent wildfires aren’t to be discounted: They were the most destructive (and deadly) in recorded California history. But now that they’ve been extinguished, the most critical aspect of recovery could be getting back to business as usual. At The Spinster Sisters, one of Eater’s essential wine country restaurants, locals have been pouring in to show their support. But what the business needs now are tourists.
“For us in Santa Rosa, the locals are our bread and butter,” says Hinman. But after this “honeymoon period,” she’s worried they’ll have to devote any extra money to their own recovery. “The tourists make the difference between survival and success.”
At the Astro, meanwhile, the FEMA program “Seemed like a great way to house people who needed homes, but also to start to establish a business, which was our intention all along.”
For Eric Anderson, who co-owns the hotel and restaurant, it all falls into the same category. “Whether you’re a fire survivor or a wine country tourist,” he says. “For us, it’s just hospitality.”
Anderson and Hinman purchased their classic but decaying mid-century modern specimen a year ago and got right to work. “It was really in bad shape,” Hinman says. Gutting large portions of the property “gave us the opportunity to really give it exactly the look we wanted, with hand-milled wood closets, local Sonoma tiles, and beautiful concrete sinks.” Anderson scoured vintage stores for mid-century period items in keeping with the hotel’s long-gone heyday, and together they restored its modernist sign.
For neighbors touting the #SonomaStrong motto, the Astro might be seen as potent a symbol of recovery. Locally, it’s long been known as a den of prostitution and drug abuse, the kind of place that charged by the hour if it was in business at all. Now, says Anderson, “I think that anyone who’s aware of it and goes by it now is beyond thrilled... people have been stopping in, taking pictures, and shaking their heads.”
- Astro Motel [Official]