The developer is a partnership between Montage Hotels & Resorts of Laguna Beach, the Athens Group of Phoenix and a number of private investors. The 262-room, 371,707-sf luxury hotel property was built to what Wentz describes as "the hospitality industry's stringent standards for coveted five-star, five-diamond ratings."

Situated on a 30-acre site featuring a coastal mesa, bluffs and beaches, the 262-room luxury hotel features an ocean-view restaurant, a bluff-top specialty restaurant, ballrooms, meeting rooms and a 20,000-sf sea spa offering ocean-related treatments. Additional amenities include two swimming pools and four hot tubs.

Brian Parno, vice president of Southern California for the Wentz Group, notes that the four-building project involved the redesign of five original one- and two-story bungalow buildings at the resort to create four buildings, preserving ocean views.

Designed by Hill Glazier Architects of Palo Alto, CA, as a California Craftsman bungalow-style hotel, the resort additionally includes 14 condominiums, 14 custom residential lots, public parking structure and seven-acre public park with pedestrian walkways.

The Athens Group's holdings in California include the $100-million, 261-room Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay, which Wentz completed in 2001 to deliver the first luxury resort along the Northern California shoreline in more than a decade. The Montage in Laguna Beach is the flagship property for Athens Group, which was founded by hotel industry veteran Alan Fuerstman, its president and CEO, to focus on hotels for affluent travelers.

The Wentz Group is based in the Northern California city of San Carlos, with regional offices in Irvine and Sacramento. It provides commercial construction industry management, construction and engineering services for corporate users, real estate development firms and institutions throughout the western US. According to Mike Jones, a vice president with Wentz Group, the company is in the preliminary stages of providing pre-construction services for the development of several other unannounced hotel projects in Northern and Southern California.