Beach House Half Moon Bay

If you’re not used to it, it’s almost unnerving how easy life can feel in the beach towns along the Northern California coast, perhaps most of all in Half Moon Bay. And needless to say, it only gets easier at the all-suite Beach House Hotel. Set on a bluff between the Pacific and the vast natural playground of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it’s the very picture of low-key coastal leisure, where morning is marked by the unhurried bustle of the fishing harbor below, night by the faint sound of a distant lighthouse, with a series of outdoor pleasures in between.

The rooms are designed to feel like self-contained beach cottages, most with views of the ocean from the balcony or patio and all with plenty of room to do your morning stretches. Should sunset overlooking the Pacific be insufficiently romantic, there’s a fireplace as well, plus oversized tubs in the spacious bathrooms.

And while the rooms are unrelentingly cozy, it would be a shame not to get outdoors. Nature just feels bigger here. At Mavericks, up the road, a routine winter swell rises twenty-five feet, a big wave two or three times that. (Not that we recommend trying your luck in the water, but it’s quite a show watching surfers defy death from the cliffs above.) And the redwoods are, well, the redwoods, enormous in a way that can only truly be appreciated by standing beneath them, very likely giddy from the strangeness of it, in person. There’s excellent mountain biking, a series of vista-rich hiking trails, horseback riding on the beach, kayaking in the harbor and even some excellent tide-pooling for the truly niche-oriented beach-goer. And if that all sounds a little too outdoorsy, there’s always the option of doing some tastings at the local vineyards, where appreciating the terroir (or pretending to) ought to be close enough to getting back to the land.

How to get there:
The hotel is located 25 miles (about a 30-minute drive) from downtown San Francisco, and about the same distance from San Francisco International Airport (SFO).