M
elissa Strukel wanted out of event planning. She longed to sink her design impulses into something bigger, more sustainable. On an early pandemic drive, she was
out in the middle-of-nowhere desert—scrub, boulders, border wall—when she spotted a temporarily closed hotel. She got up on her tiptoes and peered over the property’s wall. “I just knew it,” Strukel says. “This hotel was in my future.” When she told her business partner, Corbin Winters, about the spot, “I said, ‘Cool,’” Winters recalls. “‘But is it for sale?’” It wasn’t yet, but Strukel couldn’t stop talking about it. “My friends were like, ‘We get it, you found a hotel,’” she says. If you believe in coincidences, maybe you’d call it one, but, really, it felt more like fate: Three months after Strukel stumbled upon the hotel, it hit the market. But there was a significant catch. The hotel, they learned, came with most of the main-street shops, a defunct gas station, an old bathhouse, a dried-up lake, and about 80 percent of the land. They wouldn’t just own the hotel; they’d become stewards of a whole town. They called on Jeff Osborne, a real-estate dude and former client (they had planned his four-day, boho wedding in a remote, unplumbed meadow a few years back), who they hoped would join their partnership. He was 100 percent uninterested. “I said, ‘No, no hotels. It’s a pandemic,’” he remembers. But Osborne came to check out the place. He saw the town’s vacant buildings—really, the potential in them—and the opportunity to revive a historic place. He camped in the wash, and, by morning, he said, “Let’s make an offer.” Strukel, Winters, and Osborne closed the deal in October 2020, founded a hospitality group called We Are Human Kind, and moved to town as newly minted locals, starting work on the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. Jacumba Hot Springs, their new borough, is only a little over an hour east of downtown
OPPOSITE PAGE The hotel’s arresting doors come from China, Morroco, and India. ABOVE Strukel, Osborne, and Winters have lived and worked in Jacumba Hot Springs since becoming stewards of the town in 2020. BELOW The trio used native plants and locally sourced materials like pumice and obsidian in the hotel’s design.
39 SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE
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