Roche Harbor Resort

The Hotel

Roche Harbor sits on the northwest corner of San Juan Island, a forty minute drive (or, more romantically, a thirty minute private launch) from the Friday Harbor ferry landing. The site is unusual: a working lime quarry village built by industrialist John S. McMillin in the 1880s, complete with a workers' chapel, a stone mausoleum on the hill, a row of company town cottages, and a small formal garden. When the lime works shut, the family kept the buildings. In 1956 the Tarte family of Bellevue bought roughly 4,000 acres and twelve miles of coastline and converted the village into a seasonal resort. Cinnabon co-founder Rich Komen and partners acquired the property in 1988 and have run a long restoration since.

Lodging spans five distinct categories across the village. The Hotel de Haro itself, built in 1886 on the foundations of an old Hudson's Bay Company bunk house, holds 20 rooms above the lobby's red-painted veranda and is the oldest operating hotel in the state; rooms here are small, character-rich, and shared-bath in places, which is the point. The McMillin Suites, in the original 1886 McMillin family house perched directly above the harbor, are four rooms with the best views on the property and a private waterside porch. The Quarryman Hall Suites, newer, hold twelve deluxe rooms on the second and third floors overlooking the gardens and marina. The Company Town Cottages, originally lime workers' housing, have been renovated into nine one- and two-bedroom cottages plus four newly built additions in the same vernacular. The condominium units, built in the 1970s and 80s and refreshed since, run from one to three bedrooms and are the choice for families.

Food and drink are distributed across the village rather than concentrated in a single dining room. McMillin's Dining Room, in the original McMillin house, runs an evening menu of Pacific Northwest seafood and meats. Madrona Bar & Grill is the dockside casual room. The Lime Kiln Cafe handles breakfast and lunch. The Company Store sells provisions, and the private yacht owners moored along the deepwater marina spill into the bars at sunset, which is its own quiet entertainment. The marina itself is a working amenity, 377 guest slips, a fuel dock, a customs port of entry for cruisers arriving from Canada.

The resort's other defining notes are slower and more local. The summer flag ceremony at sunset, with cannon, bagpiper, and harbor master in formal dress, has run on the same schedule for decades and is the kind of small, dignified piece of theatre that contemporary resorts have largely lost the appetite for. Guests have access to a heated outdoor pool, two clay tennis courts, kayak and bicycle rental, a nine hole golf course adjacent to the property, and a small private spa. Whale watching boats leave the dock daily in season and Lime Kiln Point State Park, the best shore-based orca viewing on the West Coast, is twenty minutes south by car.

Best Occasion Fit

Practical Information

Also Great in the San Juan Islands