The site's recorded history begins around 1870, when William Butler Thornburgh, a settler from Jefferson County, West Virginia, built a large home he called a "castle" on the hillside. After Thornburgh died in 1878, John Ballard purchased the property. On July 14, 1901, a wildfire swept down from the hills and burned the house to the ground. The land sat empty until November 1905, when Louis Titus acquired it for approximately $37,500 on behalf of the Claremont Hotel Company - a group of investors that included Francis "Borax" Smith and Frank C. Havens, who were already building the Key System, the East Bay's major transit and real estate network. Construction began promptly, then stopped. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake choked off both supplies and financing. Work resumed in 1910, stalled again, and the hotel did not open until 1915, when Erik Lindblom invested enough capital to finally complete the building - just in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition across the Bay.

For decades, guests at the Claremont enjoyed something nearly unimaginable today: a direct rail connection to San Francisco. The Key System's E line ran from the Transbay Terminal, across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and terminated between the tennis courts just steps from the hotel lobby. Guests could gaze at the San Francisco skyline from their rooms and be standing in it within the hour. The Key System also built the Key Route Inn near downtown Oakland, giving the transit company its own small hotel empire. But the tracks were pulled up in 1958, along with the rest of the Key System, and the rail right-of-way became a pedestrian pathway. The Claremont's address - 41 Tunnel Road - hints at its other transportation advantage: the hotel sits along the principal route over the Berkeley Hills, the road that leads to what is now the Caldecott Tunnel.

The Claremont's relationship with alcohol is a story of geometry and political maneuvering. In 1873, California enacted a law prohibiting the sale of liquor within a certain distance of the University of California. The hotel fell inside the dry zone. In 1913, the hotel's investors backed a bill - AB 1620, the Ferguson bill - that would have specifically exempted the Claremont while ostensibly restricting alcohol near schools and churches statewide. Berkeley's women's clubs and temperance groups saw through the maneuver, and the bill failed by a single vote. When national Prohibition ended in 1933, the Claremont still could not serve drinks because of the old state law. Relief came in 1937, when the legislature changed the measurement from a straight line to a route following streets. According to the hotel's own lore, a resourceful university student had demonstrated in 1936 that the street distance exceeded one mile, and was rewarded with free drinks for life.

The Claremont's ownership history reads like a crash course in Bay Area real estate finance. The property went through foreclosure when lenders including Paulson & Co. and Winthrop Realty Trust called in their debts. In 2013, the owners reached a deal to sell to Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. The following year, the Fairmont Hotel chain and financier Richard Blum purchased the property for $86 million, rebranding it as the Claremont Club & Spa, A Fairmont Hotel. In May 2023, Ohana Real Estate Investors bought it for $163 million - nearly doubling the price in under a decade. By March 2025, the hotel had left Fairmont entirely and rebranded once more as the Claremont Resort & Club. Through every transaction, the white tower kept rising above the Berkeley Hills, indifferent to the name on the letterhead.

The Claremont sits on 22 acres of landscaped gardens with 279 guest rooms, a 20,000-square-foot spa, and ten tennis courts. It was deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, but its owners at the time objected to the listing. It is a designated Oakland City Historical Landmark and has been a member of Historic Hotels of America since 2016. From the air, the building is unmistakable - a sprawling white wooden structure anchored by its tall central tower, set against the dark green of the Berkeley Hills. It looks exactly like what it is: something built in another era that has refused, despite every reason and opportunity, to disappear.