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The Shattuck Hotel, once one of the toniest hotels in Northern California, is headed for a new era of grandeur, thanks to the partnership of owner Roy Nee with Starwood Hotels—considered by many the world’s leading hotelier. 

Anyone who meets Nee, a long-time Marin County resident who moved to Berkeley seven years ago, quickly discovers that he’s downtown Berkeley’s biggest booster, willing to wage an eight-figure gamble on the city’s future. 

Starwood, whose brands include the St. Regis (including the namesake hotel in New York), ITT Sheraton, The Luxury Collection, W, and Four Points, will operate the hotel under the Westin label. 

The Westin Berkeley, as the refurbished hotel will be known, will offer 199 upscale rooms, convention and meeting facilities, a spa, rooftop gardens and terraces, a wedding suite with a private courtyard and a presidential suite with its own terrace and a restaurant. 

The biggest change in the building’s exterior will be a two-story addition to the currently undistinguished Hink’s Annex building on the west end of the structure on Allston Way. 

The building will be resurfaced, and its four-story skyline will resemble the main hotel building. Ground floor spaces will continue to be used by the U.S. Post Office and YMCA, Nee said. 

A remarkable family 

Restoring the building is going to be a long, expensive process, but Nee said he feels up to the task, thanks to assistance he’ll have from an extended family that seems to epitomize the concept of over-achieving. 

Nee moved to Berkeley because his spouse, Blanche, was a principal scientist at Chiron. Frustrated with her job, she decided to go for an M.B.A., enrolling in a joint program offered by Columbia University and the Haas School at UC Berkeley. 

After graduating late last year at the top of her class and quitting her post at Chiron in March, she’s now fully immersed in the project. 

“They say husband-and-wife teams are difficult, but it’s working out great,” said the 55-year-old Nee. “She’s my business partner, along with my nephew and my son, Darin.” 

The younger Nee graduated with a physics degrees from Stanford and had been accepted into the Yale physics program to work on quantum computing, an emerging technology based on one of the most baffling of natural phenomena. 

“He turned them down and went to Turkey on an archaeological dig, and from there, he went to Egypt,” his father said. “Now he’s decided he wants to be a doctor.” 

His nephew, Kyle Harris, is the private chef to Barry Levinson, one of Hollywood’s leading lights. “He’s cooked for all the big stars,” Nee said. 

Another nephew is also involved, a Harvard graduate who is the son of Nee’s older brother, Victor, who is a department chair at Cornell. 

“If there’s such a thing as a family enterprise, this is it,” said Nee, smiling. “What I have on my side is brain power but no hotel experience—but we’re up to the game.” 

Nee’s academic background is more modest. He started college at UCLA, then moved to UC Santa Cruz a year after it opened, but his radical political activities kept him occupied in the Bay Area, so he finished his mathematics degree at San Francisco State. 

After college, he began work as a carpenter. “I worked at all the shipyards, and made journeyman,” he said. Then it was on to contracting. 

His best-known property is the Tea Garden Spa in Mill Valley, a popular facility that employs Zen principles in its offering, hence the name of the corporate entity—Zen Spa. 

With a staff of 50, the Tea Garden will offer its expertise in running the smaller spa Nee plans to install in the basement floor beneath the hotel. 

Berkeley Film Festival plans 

Nee’s MIll Valley holdings also includes the offices of the popular Mill Valley Film Festival—an event that Nee loves. 

As the new owner of a hotel building that includes a major theater, he’s already put out feelers to both the Mill Valley festival organizers and Landmarks Theaters, which in addition to the Shattuck Cinemas operates the Act 1 and 2 and California theaters in downtown Berkeley. 

Nee said the Mill Valley festival organizers are excited about the prospect of teaming up with Berkeley. 

Landmark, which operates 208 screens in 57 cities, makes a logical partner, said Nee. 

Part of 2929 Entertainment, a firm owned by Internet entrepreneur Todd Wagner and billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Landmarks is a leading showcase for independent film and is switching all its theaters to digital projection. 

“Mark Cuban is a logical partner, and we’ll be asking him if he’d give up one or two of his screens for a few days,” Nee said. 

A Berkeley film festival makes sense, he said, since the city was home to Pauline Kael, perhaps the greatest film critic of the 20th Century. Her husband once ran an art house of Telegraph Avenue, and after their divorce opened the Fine Arts Cinema at the site now occupied by Patrick Kennedy’s Fine Arts Building at the southeast corner of Haste and Shattuck. 

Challenges ahead 

Nee knows that making his biggest-ever investment in downtown Berkeley is a challenge, but he’s convinced that the new hotel will represent a major force toward revitalizing the city’s core. 

With ownership consolidated for the first time in two decades, Nee said now’s the time to move. 

“Mayor (Tom) Bates is right about championing the downtown image,” he said. “You need to have partnerships to work together to changes people’s opinions. 

“We want to foster people’s best efforts to help bring about the change, and taking an historically significant block and bringing a great hotel to the city is a good start.” 

Nee believes the hotel will help attract the kind of retail the downtown needs to make it commercially viable. 

“Right now, it’s not the right mix.” he said. “We have wonderful things like Berkeley Rep, and the Shattuck Cinemas is the Landmark’s largest grossing theater in the Bay area. Now we need to bring in the right kind of retail.” 

Once Nee formulated his vision for the property, it proved sufficiently contagious to attract several major hoteliers. He settled Starwood because of the group’s long-term management expertise. 

“They’re in it for decades,” he said. 

Unusual allies 

In a city where developers often charge that preservationists and the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) are their biggest enemies, Nee can’t offer enough praise to both. 

Leslie Emmington, both an LPC member and an employee of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, can’t stop praising Nee either. 

To her, Nee is restoring one of the city’s most significant landmarks to it’s original intent—a four star hotel that will reflect well on the city. 

Nee is bringing his project to the LPC Monday for a first look after working closely with a three-member subcommitte on which Emmington serves, said the commissioner. Emmington added, “It’s a wonderful project.” 

Because the building is a city landmark, the exterior designs must pass muster with the commission, which is charged with making sure that the refurbishing of the existing building is carried out properly, and that the expanded annex building has details that differentiate it subtly from the original construction. 

UC Hotel competition 

Neither Nee nor Westin were frightened off by the ongoing negotiations between UC Berkeley and hotelier Carpenter & Co. to build a combination high-rise hotel and conference center just a block to the northeast at the corner of Shattuck and Center Street. 

“I looked at UC’s study and I commissioned one of my own from a hotel company, and I’m convinced that there’s room for both hotels. UC attracts plenty of meetings and conferences, and we’ll be able to keep them in the city,” Nee said. 

UC has twice extended their talks with Carpenter, while Nee has been able to find a premiere operator less than a year after buying the property, so he’ll have a significant head start. 

Original vision  

The Shattuck was built by former gold prospector Francis Kittredge Shattuck in the wake of the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, when residents of that city, terrified by the disastrous fires that followed the quake, began packing up and moving to Berkeley. 

“The building was built of reinforced concrete and was fireproof, something they stressed in their advertisements,” Nee said.  

The hotel opened on Dec. 15, 1910 and proved so successful that an annex filling out the rest of the block along Shattuck, making it the longest structure in Northern California at the time. 

Berkeley was in the midst of its biggest boom at the time, and the university was starting its meteoric rise. 

Shattuck sold out to William Whitecotton in 1918, and the new owner ran it as the Whitecotton Hotel. It reverted back the Shattuck name in 1942 and has retained it through several changes of ownership and management. 

The property was split up after a bankruptcy in the early 1980s when it was seized by the government and auctioned off. 

“Now it’s a lot like when the hotel was first built,” Nee said. “Berkeley is going through a renaissance and the community is becoming friendlier to businesses, who stayed away for three decades starting in the 1960s when the city gained a radical reputation. I like to think that we’re restoring the hotel to its original vision.”