In 1911, on a steep hillside overlooking La Jolla's sea caves and the Pacific Ocean, eight small chalets appeared. They were named 'Lucerne,' 'Matterhorn,' and 'Geneva.' Their style was Swiss chalet. Their location was California. Their guests arrived by automobile along Coast Boulevard — early adopters of the car culture that would soon transform the American landscape. The Tyrolean Terrace Colony lasted 64 years before being demolished. It may have influenced the design of every roadside motel that came after it.
Architect Phillips G. Dexter, born in 1884, designed the Tyrolean Terrace Colony in an era when Swiss-chalet architecture carried specific cultural meaning in America. Switzerland was known at the time as the site of mountain sanatoriums — places where people with tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments went to breathe clean alpine air. In Southern California, which was aggressively marketing its climate as health-giving, the Swiss chalet style signaled exactly that association. Perched above La Jolla's sea caves on a hillside that must have felt genuinely alpine to a visitor from the East Coast or Midwest, the chalets also referenced the Arts & Crafts bungalow style then being developed by architects like Bernard Maybeck in the San Francisco Bay Area and Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena. The colony was built of old-growth redwood and featured verandas and balconies overlooking the sea.
The Tyrolean Terrace Colony catered specifically to early automobile traffic along Coast Boulevard — a scenic drive that led to La Jolla Park and other coastal destinations. This positioning matters: rather than a destination reached by train or ferry, the colony was designed for guests arriving in cars, seeking lodging that matched the freedom and individuality of automobile travel. At the top of the hill, facing Prospect Street, the Tyrolean Arts & Crafts Shop operated as a gift shop and tearoom, selling handcrafted jewelry, copper art crafts, pottery, and textiles. By 1923, it had become the Tyrolean Tea Shop. The combination of detached bungalows and a central communal facility anticipated the layout of what would later be called the motor hotel, or motel.
Architect Eugene Ray argued that the Tyrolean Terrace Colony — a hotel with detached bungalows arranged for automobile-arriving guests — influenced the development of the motor hotel as a building type. Ray also observed that the chalet's terraced design was adopted by modernist architect Rudolph Schindler for his El Pueblo Ribera Apartments, completed in 1923 in La Jolla. Whether or not the Tyrolean Terrace Colony was directly influential in either case, its logic — individual units, automobile access, scenic setting, modest luxury — would prove enormously consequential in mid-century America.
In 1975, the Tyrolean Terrace Colony site was listed as a San Diego Historical Landmark — but the designation protected the land, not the buildings. The same year, the chalets were demolished and replaced by the Coast Walk Shopping Center. The historical landmark status proved insufficient to prevent the loss of the structures it was meant to honor. In 2019, three luxury townhouses in the Arts & Crafts style were built on the former chalets' site, designed by Alcorn & Benton Architects. Today, the Village Stairway leading from Prospect Street down to Coast Boulevard and Goldfish Point occupies the former colony's steep hillside. The view the Swiss chalets once commanded — over sea caves, kelp forests, and open Pacific — remains.
Located at 32.849°N, 117.271°W in La Jolla, on the coastal bluffs above the sea caves near Prospect Street and Coast Boulevard. The dramatic coastal geography of La Jolla — the cove, the sea caves, the cliffs — is clearly visible from the air. Torrey Pines Gliderport lies approximately 3 miles to the north. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 feet on a clear day.