El Dorado Hotel

Project Overview

The El Dorado Hotel & Kitchen occupies an 1880 building at the corner of First Street West and West Spain Street on the Sonoma Plaza, with a restaurant, lobby and lounge at street level, a courtyard dining patio and pool, twenty-three guest suites on the second floor and four bungalow suites beside the pool. Dorman Associates has been the owner’s architect through a series of phased improvements since 2020, beginning with the restaurant’s outdoor dining parklets and continuing with planning and building submittals for new exterior doors and windows, a courtyard trellis and shade structures, pool deck improvements, new exterior signage and a replacement take-out window for the cantina.

In 2023 and 2024 the firm prepared the permit and construction documents for the interior remodel of all twenty-seven guest suites and the second-floor hallway, with new flooring, paint, lighting, casework, plumbing fixtures and enlarged showers, and transfer-type showers in the two accessible bungalow rooms. Dorman also designed the remodel of the ground-floor restaurant and hotel lobby, submitted for permit in 2024, which relocates the bar and adds a new ceiling system, lighting, millwork, new office and service areas and single-user restrooms. Dorman Associates served as architect of record throughout, in collaboration with the project’s interior designers.