Sherry Villanueva: revitalizing california
ACME Hospitality Takes Their Guests on an Immersive Journey Through California History
Ryan Kahler | Dec 11, 2024
Newlyweds at The Holbrooke Hotel in Grass Valley, California, 2024
The stars seem to have been aligned for marketing executive, restaurateur, and history junkie, Sherry Villanueva. But her future is bound to shine even brighter as she embarks on her journey as the Queen of Revitalization. What brings travelers from all over the world to her restaurants and properties lies within the stories behind each of her properties. What makes her story so special is the stroke of luck that landed her a position as the powerhouse mastermind in hospitality.
Sherry Villanueva is an entrepreneur, active community volunteer, and longtime resident of one of California’s most divine Central-coast beach towns, Santa Barbara. She is the founder and managing partner of Acme Hospitality which owns and operates eight successful restaurants in Santa Barbara’s bustling downtown district, known as The Funk Zone.
In 2019, Sherry launched Acme Lodging, a hotel development and management company with two historic boutique properties in Northern California’s Gold Country. Both national and California Historic Landmarks, The National Exchange Hotel in Nevada City and the Holbrooke Hotel in Grass Valley recently completed multi-year, extensive renovations under Sherry’s management. Her latest hotel project, Azure Sky, is a 14-room boutique hotel that opened in Palm Springs in 2022.
Sherry is paving the way for the future of the service industry by mixing exquisite elements of design, uncovering the history of the areas her properties lie on through revitalization, and delivering exceptional guest experiences. A common thread is woven in between employees and guests at her array of properties: through happy times and through difficult times, with fires and floods and pandemics, life is all about community, memory making, and celebrating everyday moments surrounded by the ones we love. Whether you geek out on American history or exceptional design or exquisite dining, Sherry Villannueva epitomizes the beauty of risk and reward.
NEW BEGINNINGS
Owning a restaurant was something Sherry dreamed about her whole life. It had been a running joke with her daughters, they used to talk about the restaurant they would open one day, called ‘The Spotted Dog’. It would be a beautiful restaurant where families, colleagues, travelers, even solo diners could come sit down and forget about the chaos that entails our everyday lives. A place people could come and enjoy a breath of fresh air in peace. It would deliver the needs of its community: it would connect people from all walks of life, and encourage people to slow down and enjoy the funk of life.
They would find ideas out in the world and it became this long time shared ideation intertwined within her family. Only this was just a concept envisioned by Sherry and her family. But when her youngest daughter left for college, Sherry realized this concept was no longer a vision. This was her dream.
Within ten years Sherry has not only made this dream a reality - but she has taken this dream to levels beyond expectation. Sherry Villanueva and her team have made it clear that imagination is only the frontier. Sherry has spent the grand majority of her life living in California. For the past 25 years she has lived in Santa Barbara, but has lived all across the state in Southern, Northern, and Central California.
Sherry at The Lark, Diani Boutique 2018
SHERRY’S STORY
Sherry’s background did not begin in the hospitality industry. In fact her entrance into the industry came at the stroke of luck. Her background happens to be in marketing, which she did for nearly 25 years. Her most recent role was her partnership and co-founding of Twist Worldwide, a boutique trend research agency under contract with Target Corporation for 12 years. Her role was to uncover emerging trends and consumer motivated values which she accomplished through intensive travel and cultural research. Through her research she would uncover trends and themes with consumer behavior and bring that back to her clients at the corporate office.
Sherry’s skill was understanding people: what motivated them, what they are craving and desiring, what they truly care about, what makes them tick. As she began to wind down from her marketing career at Target, Sherry yearned for a new opportunity: something that she could do in her own backyard that would cater to her community and to more of the aspects of life she enjoys.
In an almost crucial time for Sherry, opportunity came knocking at her door. An area in her own backyard was in desperate need of revitalization. The area was known as The Funk Zone in Santa Barbara. Historically, it has always served as a functional area of Santa Barbara, utilized for commercial purposes.
TIME TO REVITALIZE
From the early 1900s on, this area was the industrial, marine, and manufacturing port of town. By the late 1900s the Funk Zone was overtaken by local artists, musicians, surfboard designers, and such. The area was dilapidated. The buildings were broken down, and fell short of safety standards. But for those living in a fairly pricey region of the world and were struggling to stay afloat as artists - this area was much more affordable.
Fast forward to the 2010s, these historic buildings were purchased by developers, and the area was ripe for reimagination. This piqued the interest of Sherry, who had a strong passion for history, and knew exactly what her community was yearning for. She knew what people wanted and what made people tick, and knew what he could do with this area for the community.
Sherry was presented the idea and accepted the opportunity with open arms. With no prior background in the hospitality industry, this was a major risk. She was met with lots of concern and doubts, but she reminded herself that avoiding risks makes success impossible. While failure could have been very possible for Sherry, she knew that nothing in life comes easy.
Interested in the roots of the area, and how she could make this area come back to life while keeping those roots intact was a task that Sherry found to be extremely rewarding. In terms of location, the buildings stood in the heart of nature. From every direction you are engulfed by Central California’s extraordinary beauty. The mountains sort of tumble into the ocean. Sherry started falling in love with the community and the history of the buildings and properties. She wanted to honor that history through her revitalization project.
Developers knew the area was entangled in the roots of all this great stuff, but just needed someone on the people's side of things to make a time and financial investment to get this going. Sherry was the first to make this large scale investment. Sherry began to reimagine not just one concept, one restaurant within the area - but rather, an entire miny-city in the heart of Santa Barbara’s downtown, residential, and beach area.
“Was this frightening,” I asked Sherry. “With a capital F,” to which she responded, “I had no experience in the restaurant industry so this was just an imagination I had, that I really prayed would be a success in coming to life,” she adds.
Sherry’s plan for making these buildings come to life again?
Her vision was to create an area that yielded a sense of discovery for visitors coming to the funk zone. She didn’t want any of the concepts to be the same. In one area there would be a cute boutique, over there is a cool cocktail lounge, and down the street serves the absolute best Spanish tapas. It would have been far easier for Sherry if all these concepts shared something in common. But this is where Sherry’s marketing mastermind comes to light, she knows exactly what these communities are yearning for and is able to deliver the supply to meet this demand within her concepts. Each concept is unique in their offering and delivery.
The Lark, named after the overnight Pullman train of the Southern Pacific Railroad that serviced Santa Barbara from 1910 -1968, was the first of three concepts introduced to the Funk Zone by Sherry and her team. The restaurant was the centerpiece of this company and revolved around the idea of community. In the center of the restaurant is a massive one-thousand pound communal table with 22 seats ready for community interaction. “We did a shared plate menu specifically for the reason that people are going to talk with each other about what they want to eat, and come to an agreement,” says Sherry.
That's the visioning mindset she has for new concepts: what’s needed? What do people want? Who’s traveling there, and what are they looking for? What kind of space is needed, and design, and food? What story is she going to tell? Every layer of what we designed into restaurants are built around the idea of building community, making it the center of the neighborhood. By 2023, Sherry’s repertoire had multiplied to inhabiting eight unique concepts within the funk zone. But dining was just the start. Sherry’s success in repurposing this area had expanded to lodging in 2018, when she took on the challenge of revitalizing two California Historic Landmarks into modern day boutique hotels: The National Exchange Hotel and The Holbrooke Hotel. To acquire these properties was a challenge in itself, but Sherry had just about a million other loopholes she had to go through in order to get these hotels rolling.
From layers of regulations, planning commissions, city council approvals, a global pandemic, and an immense amount of yellow tape to get through, nothing could stop her from doing what she loved - revitalizing. In terms of growth for the company - Sherry states she is looking at new opportunities for controlled growth. She is looking to create epicenters for communities to come together to meet the demands of her guests. Like little mini-cities within a city. She is very selective about expansion, and only wants to do something that is going to meet the needs of a community, exceptionally well. Her goal with new establishments is to celebrate those communities and its history with her mastermind revitalization skills.
Sherry’s mission with opening new concepts is to inspire a new offering and lifespan for the community to utilize while keeping the roots of the areas intact. All of her properties are rooted in immense history and her group is becoming known for its respect for carefully bringing this pieces of history back to life.
To learn about the areas her properties are located in, Sherry becomes a relentless journalist and anthropologist. She undergoes research and training and teaching about the history of these interesting places that we get to learn about as a guest at her properties. Sherry loves storytelling. She would meet with historians, dig into historical societies for hours, look for photographs and art, interview local families, and immerse herself into these communities all to learn about the history rooted into these areas and study how she could keep these places alive and continue to tell the story for the next generation.
At The National, Sherry aims to tell the story of a woman from the Gold Rush. Very beautiful, traveled, and sophisticated. Not to be messed with, she probably had a gun hidden on her while she was ordering a shot at the bar. The art throughout the hotel features 380 women from the Gold Rush and embodies a spirit of celebrating feminine spirit and women through design. That’s the kind of journey she wants to take her guests on.
In the blink of an eye
Every layer of Sherry’s company is rooted in design. The menus, physical design, brand story, cocktail program, and live entertainment which are designed into these concepts are built around the idea of building community appreciation, making it central to the neighborhood. Feeling this idea of ‘timelessness’ was a grounding theme throughout the properties. That your experience with ACME should not just be rooted around a meal or a cocktail, but by an immersive journey through history and community. All design elements throughout her properties have a connection to history to make it feel like you're in that historical time and place without feeling like you're in a museum.
ACME is a spitting image of Sherry’s core values. Sherry operates nearly everything she does with a strong commitment to her community. She encourages her whole team to be individually and collectively a part of the communities they are working in. To create connections with the guests and with one another.
From the top of the chain all the way down to bottom, the entire company is operationally high touch. The senior team is present in restaurants and hotels all day, every day making sure every detail is being attended to. The company is heavily focused on guest experience. To Sherry, everything boils down to this: how did she and her employees exceed the guests expectations? “It’s the relationship you have with your guests that decides everything,” says Sherry.
Some restaurants maybe, lightly put, forget that it's not just about the food or the chef, but it’s about delivering an exceptional experience to the guest. Instilled in her employees and company spirit is a theme of taking care of one another. Taking care of guests, taking care of each other, taking care of themselves. A common love language spoken throughout the company seems to be happiness. In their guests, in their employees, in everyone involved with the company.
While the stars seemed to have aligned for Sherry, running these multilayered companies has not always been such an easy process. The company's biggest struggle was, like most, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Forced to lay off nearly half of her 550 employees was “heart wrenching,” says Sherry. The sense of insecurity: opening then closing, then partially opening, to closing again.
That was something that Sherry could have never predicted when entering the hospitality industry, that at one point she could lose everything. This was a risk she accepted when she dove into the industry. But this served as a wakeup call for Sherry. She knew that hundreds, if not thousands of people depend on her in her community. Inspired to give back to her own ACME family as well as community in this trying time became her priority. Sherry commuted back and forth between the properties 7 hours each way, weekly, for a year. She turned her array of concepts into functional grocery stores for her employees and supplied local nonprofits with supplies and resources they needed to support the community.
Sherry Villanueva has perfected the guest experience. She has turned her properties into an immersive trance that encapsulates history junkies, and travelers from all over the world. Guests are choosing to stay at her boutique hotels rather than nearby corporate hotels because all of the properties have a story to tell. Some aspects of history to uncover. The opportunities for hospitable new concepts with a historical twist seem to be endless for Sherry.
