Alex Madonna, founder of the Central California landmark hotel the Madonna Inn, died Thursday, according to the L.A. Times.
If you've ever driven north on the 101, you've encountered the Madonna. And if you've ever gone inside, well, it's like no other hotel. Writes the Times:
In Alex Madonna's world, nothing succeeded quite like excess. His motto was "go whole hog," and he did just that in designing one of the world's most eccentric hotels, with its Pepto-Bismol-pink color scheme and jaw-dropping waterfall urinal in the men's room that drew tittering tourists with cameras.
A barrel-chested man with a sharp tongue for any bureaucrat who dared cross him, Madonna and his inn were iconic symbols of California's Central Coast for visitors from around the world, many of whom flooded the inn's website Thursday with condolences. His "tremendous personality" will "live on in my mind," wrote one admirer. Calls were coming in from as far away as Florida.
And the gaudy Madonna Inn, described as "Swiss country with a gingerbread fairy motif," with its oddball suites ? the Caveman Room where one could sleep under a rock ceiling and shower in a waterfall; the 33-foot-long sofa in the Pick and Shovel Room ? was itself nothing less than a monument to Madonna's outsized persona: a bit coarse, mocking of convention.
Madonna was 85.
No comments:
Post a Comment