The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa

The Mission Inn Hotel and Spa in downtown Riverside is among the more ambitious Spanish-colonial revival buildings ever constructed in the United States, the product of decades of expansion under hotelier Frank Augustus Miller and successive architects from the 1880s through the 1930s. The complex grew from a modest two-story boardinghouse opened by Miller's father in the 1870s into a city-block-sized hotel that came to define the architectural identity of Riverside and the broader inland citrus belt.

The buildings were constructed of brick, reinforced concrete, and stuccoed masonry rather than true adobe, but were detailed throughout in the mission and Spanish-colonial revival vocabulary that Miller championed as the appropriate architectural expression of southern California. Successive wings were designed by Arthur B. Benton, Myron Hunt, and G. Stanley Wilson, each campaign adding domes, towers, flying buttresses, arcaded loggias, tile roofs, and decorative tilework. The complex eventually incorporated chapels, cloisters, courtyards, a campanario, and an extensive collection of historic Spanish and Mexican religious art and decorative objects assembled by Miller during his travels.

The hotel hosted a remarkable series of presidents, statesmen, and cultural figures during the early twentieth century and served as a focal point for the broader mission revival movement that shaped southern California civic and resort architecture. After a period of decline in the mid-twentieth century, the property underwent extensive restoration in the late twentieth century.

The Mission Inn continues to operate as a hotel and conference center, with its historic interiors and exteriors largely preserved and interpreted as a working living-history site.

Within California's adobe and revival traditions, the Mission Inn stands as one of the more encyclopedic single examples of the early-twentieth-century mission and Spanish-colonial revival, translating the formal vocabulary of the older missions and ranchos into a uniquely elaborate civic and commercial landmark.