Architect W. H. Weeks designed the De Anza with a stepped facade: a ten-story central tower flanked by nine-story wings on either side, their zigzag parapets giving the building a crown-like profile against the sky. Mayan influences appear in the details of those stepped edges, a fashionable motif of the era that connected California's Art Deco movement to pre-Columbian geometry. A band of twelve arched windows highlights the second floor, while rosettes and an elaborate relief pattern climb toward the top two stories. On the west wall, painted letters spelling Hotel De Anza share space with the image of a diver, a vintage advertisement for the courtyard swimming pool tucked behind the building. That same wall now carries a mural by Jim Miner titled Life Abundant in the Face of Death Imminent, completed in August 2016 and visible to every driver passing along West Santa Clara Street.

Step through the front doors and the mood shifts. The lobby is two stories tall, dominated not by the geometric precision of Art Deco but by the warmth of Spanish Colonial Revival. Massive wooden beams stretch overhead, stenciled in colored floral patterns that look like they belong in a hacienda rather than a downtown hotel. Wrought iron is everywhere: in the balconies that overhang the lobby, in a chandelier so large it commands the room, in the double-arched doorways that frame each passage. A fireplace with a canopy reaching to the ceiling anchors one wall. Even the interior doors carry their own stenciled floral designs, each one distinct. It is a building that wanted to be two things at once, Art Deco on the outside and old California on the inside, and somehow the contradiction holds together.

By the 1970s, the De Anza had decayed into the kind of building cities tend to erase. The rooms were tired, the plumbing ancient, the economics discouraging. Demolition seemed inevitable. Instead, the San Jose Redevelopment Agency intervened, arranging a reconstruction that cost twenty times the hotel's original construction price. It was an extraordinary bet on a building whose best years appeared to be behind it. The gamble paid off, at least for a while. The hotel joined Hyatt's Destination by Hyatt brand in 2019, gaining corporate polish and a national reservation system. But the relationship proved short-lived.

On May 30, 2024, the Hotel De Anza closed its doors and severed ties with Hyatt. For months, the ten-story landmark sat empty in the heart of downtown San Jose, its zigzag parapets casting shadows over sidewalks that no longer led to a functioning lobby. In November 2024, the shuttered hotel sold for $11.5 million, roughly half of what it had been valued at a decade earlier. By December, the building reopened with renovations underway, its new owners betting that the De Anza still has chapters left to write. It is a pattern the hotel seems destined to repeat: decline, rescue, reinvention. The two hundred citizens who funded the original construction in 1931 could not have imagined this particular arc, but they would recognize the stubbornness behind it.