By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
YACHATS – The city’s largest motel complex is being acquired by a coastal lodging group in a sale expected to be completed by Friday.
Ed and Karen Pfannmuller, who have owned the Adobe Motel and Restaurant for 45 years, are selling to Fusion Lodging of Portland, which owns 10 smaller motels stretching from Newport to Seaside.
The purchase price has not been disclosed.
The sale has been under way for weeks and has become widely known in the community. Final paperwork was signed last week with Fusion expected to take ownership on Friday. The new owners intend to continue the motel and restaurant/lounge operations.
According to the latest data from the Lincoln County assessor’s office, the three involved properties have a total market value of $15.6 million.
The Adobe has 110 rooms – double the size of Fusion’s largest property – a large restaurant and lounge, a swimming pool, a large duplex, and a house where the Pfanmuller’s live when visiting from La Quinta, Calif. or Eugene. The Adobe’s employment ranges from 60 to 80 people, depending on the season.
The main Adobe property is slightly under nine acres. The purchase also includes two tax lots on the north side of the motel complex that stretch 1,060 feet from U.S. Highway 101 to the ocean.
A Fusion Lodging representative has approached the city and a local conservation group to get their reaction to a proposal to develop a 23-lot subdivision on the two northernmost tax lots, which total 4.73 acres.
Those lots are bordered on the north by Smelt Sands Beach State Park. There are former shell middens on the west edge of the property adjacent to the 804 Trail, which will require a state archeological inspection before they can be disturbed. Any development on the two north lots could also be affected by wetlands, which would require a study by the Oregon Department of State Lands.
Fusion Lodging is owned by Sazzadur Rahman of Portland, who could not be reached for comment. The Pfannmuller’s declined to comment through Adobe general manager Anthony Muirhead.
After news of the pending sale broke Monday, Muirhead went on various Facebook pages to reassure people that “the Adobe isn’t closing. The staff isn’t being laid off or fired.”
Muirhead, who has been general manager for eight years and is a Yachats city councilor, said after 45 years in the hospitality business the Pfannmullers “deserve our respect and understanding that they would like to retire and focus on their family.”
Fusion has 10 other properties
Fusion is a rapidly growing coastal hospitality company with mid-range properties. Last summer it purchased two motels in Lincoln City — the 25-room Seagull Beachfront Inn and a 53-room Travelodge property that it renamed the Coastal Inn. It also bought the Coast River Inn and City Center Motel in Seaside and seven cabins in Oceanside near Tillamook in 2021.
Fusion also owns three properties in Newport – The Waves Motel, Newport Inn & Suites, and Moolack Shores Inn. Its largest property is the Clarion Surfrider Resort north of Depoe Bay, with 55 rooms and a restaurant-bar operation similar to the Adobe’s.
The Adobe opened in 1952, a labor of love by Larry Smith of Yachats who used clay from the site to mix with sandy loan to make 4-by-8-by-16-inch bricks. Smith made 17,029 bricks to build the first motel rooms, lobby, and restaurant/bar, according to Teresa McCracken who is writing a history of Yachats.
The Adobe had 12 units and 22 bedrooms when it opened, McCracken said, and Smith went to work in the restaurant as its chef.
The Pfanmullers owned a poultry company in Eugene when that business was purchased. They were looking for other opportunities and bought the Adobe in 1977, Ed Pfanmuller told the Oregon Lodging and Restaurant Association in 2011 when he received an industry achievement award.
The Adobe is known for its large oceanfront restaurant and lounge overlooking a spectacular, rocky section of the coast along the 804 Trail.
Bummer.
Twenty three houses packed into a 4.73 acre area is going to look bad, as in an ugly subdivision. I once owned a 4.9 acre horse ranch, so the most that can realistically go into a space that size is 8 houses to avoid an ugly eyesore. Given the hot real estate market, there would be no problem siting that number of well designed, single level homes with green spaces which would sell without creating an ugly, crowded, suburbia style subdivision.
I didn’t hear any complaints about the units just south of the bridge…