DANA POINT : Inn Repaints After Brush With City Law

The fight to brighten the Dana Point Inn is over.

Owners of the inn, who several months ago tried to repaint its exterior a peach color, gave in to the city’s demands this week and returned the 88-room, five-story inn to city-approved blue and gray.

“We lost,” desk clerk Petrine Hinrichsen said Tuesday. “That’s why we’re putting the finishing touches on the blue today.”

Painters were halted in mid-stroke last March by city officials, and the hotel’s paint job had remained unfinished since then, partly peach and partly blue and gray. Peach is not on the city’s approved pallette of colors and could not be applied, city officials told the inn’s owners, Jett Mora and the Los Angeles-based Incomvest Co.

The approved pallette consists of five colors: cool gray, cool blue, cool green, lead red or white, according to Ed Knight, the city’s director of community development.

Inn Manager Linda Dizon said the peach exterior was in response to customer comments and was an attempt to brighten the look of the inn. An application to change the color was later filed with the city but was denied, said Incomvest spokeswoman Grace Beleno.

There was no choice but to hire painters to redo the exterior with no compensation from the city, she said.

“We’re out the expense, including labor and materials, to start over and do it again,” Beleno said. She estimated the cost so far at about $2,500.

Just how many customers may have decided against staying at the inn because of its unfinished exterior Beleno could not say.

“All we know is that it looked awful for so many months,” she said.