Review: Sanctuary Beach Resort Monterey, After My Stay With 3 Kids

The term “beach hotel” gets used pretty loosely these days. As a professional travel photographer, I’ve stayed at plenty of “beach” hotels that turn out to be a long walk—or even a drive—away from any actual sand or surf.

The Sanctuary Beach Resort in Monterey, California is completely different. It’s on one of California’s most beautiful, windswept coastal beaches.

And when I say “on”, I mean that literally. When you arrive at the Sanctuary Beach Hotel, you park your car at the entrance, and a bellman drives you to your room in a golf cart. 

That’s because the rooms themselves are so close to the surf that they’re literally perched on cliffs above the water, or even fully surrounded by sand.

And lest you think this is some kind of rustic “glamping” experience, it’s not. The Sanctuary Beach Resort’s rooms are newly renovated, super luxurious, and filled with niceties like pour-over coffee kettles, roaring fireplaces, luxury bathrooms and high-end binoculars so you can see every detail of the beach below you.

Add in a fantastic onsite restaurant and a nightly bonfire tradition that feels like something from a movie, and you’ve got all the ingredients for an amazing stay.

I stayed with my wife and three kids (ages 8, 5 and 4). Here’s my review.

The Property

The Sanctuary Beach Resort is a Monterey hotel, but it’s technically located in Marina, California. I’ve driven to Monterey many times from the Bay Area where I live, but I’m usually going to the downtown area with Cannery Row (more on that below).

Sanctuary Beach Resort is located in a long stretch of beach that you drive by as you approach downtown Monterey. You might recognize the area from the drifting sand that forms little dunes on the side of the highway. A slightly more remote location makes for a secluded and beautiful spot, enhancing the “sanctuary” concept of the hotel.

When you first arrive at Sanctuary Beach Resort, you’re greeted by a spacious front entry and a pleasant lobby with a roaring fire (the photo at the top of the article).

The use of fire is a big component of the overall experience at the Sanctuary. It factors into the food at the on-site Salt Wood restaurant, an evening tradition of fire pits by the ocean, and much else about the hotel.

That makes sense, as the Sanctuary Beach Resort is located on a beautiful, windy, rugged NorCal beach. Crabs scuttle across the sand and tide pools form as the ocean recedes. Fog sweeps in in the morning, and sea lions swim by in the protected marine sanctuary waters outside.

The fire and overall coziness provide a nice contrast to the rugged, natural surroundings. You feel that you’re in nature, but also constantly warm and cozy!

To that end, the reception building has comfy chairs, tabletop games, and a small store with essentials and local items.

There’s also a spa, which I’ll get to below.

When you check in, the front desk staff immediately give you a glass of Chandon sparkling wine. The hotel seems to be in partnership with Chandon, as you’ll see their wines everywhere throughout the property.

On our arrival, the check-in process was fast and seamless. You then drive your car into a parking area (they do have EV chargers) where you’re greeted by a bellman in a large, fancy golf cart.

This is where the experience of staying at the Sanctuary Beach Resort starts to feel unique. Instead of walking to your room, you board the golf cart with your stuff and drive about five minutes up the hill to your room right on the beach.

The lack of cars on property is nice in that it encourages you to walk, and the golf carts are always a call away if you need a ride somewhere. It’s also a necessity, as you’re staying inside a protected marine sanctuary area.

The experience of being driven up the hill to your room creates an additional sense of being transported somewhere else–separated from day-to-day life.

All of the bellmen who drove us around during our stay were extremely friendly and gracious. When you’re traveling with three kids, you end up bringing a lot of stuff! They didn’t mind carrying all of it for us, and even had to make several trips back and forth on some occasions to bring all our items.

The property itself consists of multiple small buildings, each of which houses 2 to 4 suites or deluxe rooms. The individual buildings are situated either right on the beach, on cliffs overlooking the water, or slightly set back. There are walking paths between each of the small buildings, and shared spaces like a big bocce ball court, pool area, and the Salt Wood restaurant.

Perhaps the best feature of the hotel is its incredibly close proximity to the beach. None of the rooms are more than a 2 to 3 minute walk to the water. Where we stayed, we could walk out our room, turn right, walk down a small path and be right on the beach.

Some of the rooms, especially those labeled as “panoramic” on the hotel’s website, are literally on the sand and surrounded by beach on all sides.

Sanctuary Beach Resort shares its property with a Wyndham timeshare condo development. They have a nice playground which we were able to use with the kids to help them get some energy out after a long drive.

The Room

For our stay, we ended up in a suite-style room on cliffs overlooking the water. (The Sanctuary Beach Resort hosted us for a stay so that we could review the property. They provided one meal and some amenities, and the Bay Area Telegraph paid for our other meals, spa experiences, and incidentals out of our own pocket.)

Given the beachside location, I was expecting a room that would be clean, but on the rustic side. I’ve stayed in several “glamping” style properties, and I was expecting something along those lines.

The reality is very different. The rooms at the Sanctuary Beach Resort are genuinely luxurious – well appointed, recently renovated, spacious, and modern.

The resort doesn’t have double rooms – they only have rooms with king beds. I was worried that that would make it a little challenging to stay there with three kids.

As it turned out, our suite-style room had plenty of space. Although it was still a single room, there was a large king bed, a couch that converted into a pullout, full-size bed, and a settee-style bench that served as a perfect cozy bed for our middle son. If you’re visiting with kids, I definitely recommend getting the suite-style room rather than a deluxe room if you can.

Our room had a fireplace (again, fire is a huge component here!), and almost 500 ft.² of space.

The king bed was comfortable, and the pullout sleeper bed was less comfortable, but still perfectly useful.

Again, everything felt brand new and nicely renovated. The room had a low-key, nautical feel with a blue color scheme and gold accents.

The bathroom was a particularly nice surprise. It felt genuinely large and luxurious, with a soaking tub, separate shower stall, and plenty of space at the sink and vanity.

A sliding barn-style door made it easy to access the bathroom while maximizing the space.

The room also came with a small kitchenette-style alcove in the front. There isn’t a full kitchen, but this area had a sink, a dispenser for filtered water, a microwave, and a large mini fridge with plenty of space to store lunch items or leftovers.

The room also came with a very classy Fellow pour-over kettle for making coffee in the morning or brewing tea.

We didn’t plan ahead enough to bring much of our own food, but you could easily bring makings for lunch or breakfast and have those items yourself in your room. As I’ll get to, though, the food at the on-site restaurant is excellent, and breakfast on the beach was one of our favorite experiences during our stay!

Still, traveling with three little boys, it would be great to have a small food prep area. As it was, we used the microwave to make some popcorn for an impromptu movie night, and stored plenty of leftovers in the fridge so that the kids could munch on them when they got hungry.

The best part of the room was its location. We had a full ocean view, with a beautiful balcony right on the edge of the protected marine sanctuary area.

The clifftop location meant our spot was incredibly secluded – no one was walking by outside, as the unstable, natural cliffs are a restricted area.

The front patio had a beautiful view of the setting sun in the evening. The vibe of our stay was more “family vacation”, but I could see this being an incredibly romantic spot for a couples getaway, or a very restorative one for a personal retreat.

With the front door of our room open, we could hear the waves crashing on the rocks below and see the water stretching away to the horizon. We could also see plenty of bubbles drifting around pretty much the whole time, as the hotel kindly provided our kids with an electric bubble maker that they used constantly throughout the visit!

Sanctuary Beach Resort adds lots of custom touches to make the location feel special. Each room comes with a pair of high-powered Nikon binoculars which you can use to see whales in Monterey Bay during the whale season, and which we enjoyed using to spot birds and other critters on the sand.

Overall, the room felt very peaceful and luxurious. Although there are other people in the rooms around you, it still feels like a very private and secluded spot.

It was also beautiful to be right on the beach. You could sit in the settee under the window, and have sand right there in front of you, with the ocean in the background.

Our room’s rack rate was about $900 per night. If you book well in advance, though, rates seem to be as low as the $500-$600 per night range for a comparable suite-style room.

Salt Wood Restaurant and Food Overall

The Sanctuary Beach Resort’s secluded location means that it’s challenging to find lots of food options in the area.

The beautiful seclusion and being driven up to your room by a golf cart means that there aren’t really restaurants off property within walking distance, and downtown Monterey is about a 20 minute drive away.

We often order DoorDash for the kids when traveling, and while that is possible at the Sanctuary Beach Resort, wait times for most restaurants were over an hour given the location.

Luckily, although it’s hard to get outside food, Sanctuary Beach Resort has an absolutely fantastic restaurant.

Salt Wood Restaurant

Salt Wood Kitchen and Oysterette is located right on the property. It was about a five minute walk from our room.

We stopped by Salt Wood on our second night and had a fantastic, lavish and delicious meal there.

Salt Wood serves coastal California cuisine inspired by the hotel’s beachside location. The restaurant has an upscale, slightly nautical interior, with tall ceilings and plenty of space for big parties.

It also has an outdoor dining area, which apparently has fire pits.

The restaurant’s heart and soul, though, is a massive wood-fired grill located right in the center of the dining room. Although it’s vented to the outdoors, the smell of wood smoke still subtly permeates the restaurant, and you’ll find a giant stack of wood logs by the door when you first come in.

The cooking style is unique, visually stunning, and yields some awesome dishes.

Essentially, the chefs at Salt Wood cook most of the dishes over live fire, as if they’re cooking on a campfire by the beach. It’s a challenging technique requiring them to constantly move the food around and adjust the heat of the fire to get the perfect level of doneness.

If you sit at the bar, you can watch all of this action take place. We were close enough at our table to observe the chefs cooking over the wood throughout the evening.

The menu at Salt Wood reflects this style of live fire cooking. There are a wide variety of grilled fish and steak dishes, as well as some delicious pastas and appetizers.

As the name implies, Salt Wood Kitchen and Oysterette has an excellent oyster menu. They serve oysterettes – small oysters that are served either raw or cooked over the wood grill.

The nice thing with oysterettes is that they’re smaller, so you can eat four or five in one sitting as an appetizer without feeling full. They’re also cheaper than a large oyster, priced at four dollars to five dollars each. That means you can sample them in a variety of styles.

We had several plates of grilled oysters, served with Gilroy garlic butter. There are also options with kimchi and other ingredients.

The grilled oysters made a perfect start to the meal. Salt Wood also brought out tasty butter noodles for the kids.

The kids’ cheeseburger was fantastic and something I would totally order for myself!

Our kids are used to traveling and eating at pretty fancy places, so they rarely stick to the kids’ menu. Our five-year-old got the smoked half Mary’s chicken, which was phenomenal. It came with a smoky, slightly spicy barbecue sauce, which we got on the side. I definitely recommend it, and we took back the leftovers to munch on the next day.

My eight-year-old son shared a steak with me. It was served with a deliciously creamy bed of mashed potatoes, and the steak was cooked over the wood fire, giving it a nice crust on the outside and a tasty, smoky flavor.

My wife got a lobster pasta. It was filled with fresh tomatoes on top with an incredibly generous portion of grilled lobster. This was one of the standout dishes and was absolutely delicious, as well as decadent.

Salt Wood has excellent cocktails, inspired by the wellness concept of the resort, featuring botanicals and local ingredients.

My wife got a dramatically colorful cocktail, and I tried a local beer from Salt Wood’s rotating draft menu.

Sanctuary gives many guests cards for free glasses of sparkling wine at Salt Wood, and I enjoyed one of these with my meal as well.

My wife’s birthday was coming up the following weekend, so Salt Wood was kind enough to bring out birthday cake ice cream with a candle so we could sing!

Overall, the beautiful interior, wafting smell of wood smoke, delicious and festive food, and excellent service made for a great dining experience! This is a place that’s definitely upscale enough for a pre-wedding celebration or date night, but the campfire-style cooking and large interior makes it casual enough to bring the family.

Sometimes, on-site restaurants at hotels – especially those with beautiful views nearby – phone it in when it comes to the food. Salt Wood doesn’t do that at all. The restaurant greatly enhances the experience of staying at the hotel, and may even be enough of a draw to get some folks to stay there overnight after their Salt Wood meal.

Room Service

In addition to dining at Salt Wood, we also tried out their room service offerings.

Sanctuary Beach Resort has an all-day menu created by the Salt Wood kitchen and delivered to your room in the ubiquitous golf carts.

This was honestly one of the best room service meals I’ve ever had! Because Salt Wood was so close by, the food arrived perfectly fresh. I’ve had a lot of soggy room service sandwiches, but in this case, the food was just as good as you’d have in the dining room.

We got a delicious grilled fish dish, and more of that tasty smoked chicken.

We also tried a Meyer lemon dessert that was excellent.

One thing to keep in mind when ordering food is that Salt Wood has a relatively small kitchen, and they can get busy. Our meals to the room were great, but they took a long time to arrive – sometimes much longer than the restaurant had promised.

If you’re going to order room service, I’d recommend allowing plenty of time, and planning for at least 45 minutes to an hour for the food to arrive. If you’re there with kids, order well before they start to get hungry!

Breakfast on the Beach

One of the coolest experiences that Salt Wood and Sanctuary Beach Resort offer is a breakfast basket to enjoy on the beach.

You can order this the night before by filling out a tag and putting it on your door.

In the morning, Salt Wood’s kitchen will bring over a big wicker basket with your meal inside.

The breakfast menu was a bit less comprehensive than I’ve seen at other properties. The continental breakfast only offered croissants and toast, rather than the muffins and pastries you often see.

Likewise, the hot options were largely limited to things like bacon and eggs, although there was also a French toast option on the menu.

Cereal and other essentials rounded out the breakfast menu, and everything was served with plenty of coffee for the grownups and juices for the kids.

Despite the somewhat more limited menu options, the breakfast turned out to be one of our favorite experiences of the stay! We ordered continental breakfast, some extra croissants, as well as a yogurt parfait, which we took over to the beach in the wicker basket. We set up a blanket on the sand in the early morning, ate fruit, croissants, coffee, and yogurt while the kids ran around and played in the sand.

We ended up spending hours on the beach in the morning, enjoying the perfectly secluded spot and having a very leisurely meal.

There’s nothing quite as perfect as sitting in a beach chair with your feet in the sand, drinking a mug of black coffee as the sun rises.

The beach breakfast is also one of the more economical food options. A lavish spread for everybody is still under $100 including tip and delivery fees. It felt like the perfect way to take advantage of the hotel’s incredible location.

Other Food Notes

One other thing to note for families is that, although DoorDash options are limited, the hotel is happy to accept grocery deliveries from Instacart.

For our last night, we ordered some cereal for the kids to have breakfast the next morning, and the front desk was able to accept the order and hold it until we could pick it up. Some hotels can be difficult or judgey about this, and we didn’t find that was the case at all with the Sanctuary Beach Resort.

The ability to order items to the room is essential for families. If you forget something, you can typically have it delivered from the nearby Safeway in under an hour.

Overall, the lack of nearby dining options can feel a little limiting. But that’s more than compensated for by the fantastic quality of meals from Salt Wood.

I would definitely recommend dining in the restaurant, if for no other reason than the ability to experience the awesome live fire cooking.

If you don’t end up dining there, you should at least get the beach breakfast. It was one of the most peaceful, beautiful ways I’ve ever had a mug of coffee in the morning – and I’ve had a lot of mugs of coffee in the morning during my travels!

Activities at the Sanctuary Beach Resort

The main emphasis at Sanctuary Resort is on the beach itself. The proximity to the beach is far and away the best feature of the hotel.

In addition, though, Sanctuary has a variety of activities and things you can do while you’re on the property.

Being a small hotel, these aren’t as extensive as what you could find in a full, large-scale resort property. Still, there were some things to do.

Classes and Wellness Experiences

Sanctuary Beach Resort appears to be putting a strong emphasis on wellness experiences. They have yoga classes, sound healing, meditation, tarot card readings and more.

Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out for us to test these on our stay. It’s also hard to really focus in on a meditative practice when you’re traveling with three little boys!

Still, the yoga and other experiences on offer look great. They take good advantage of the location on the beach. And they definitely capture the NorCal Central Coast vibe.

The Spa

If early morning yoga isn’t quite your vibe, Sanctuary Beach Resort also has a small but excellent spa.

My wife tested out the spa with a traditional massage. The spa is located on the second level of the main reception building.

It has a small relaxation room – really more like a locker room or changing area to prepare.

It’s a restful spot, though, and my wife reported that it felt very calming and secluded.

The quality of the massage itself, though, is the most important thing for any spa. The technicians at the Sanctuary Beach Resort are apparently top-notch, and my wife loved the experience of getting a treatment there.

In addition to traditional massages, Sanctuary Beach Resort has a full spa menu, complete with plenty of wellness offerings, again reflecting their wellness retreat direction.

The Pool

The resort has an outdoor pool set back from the beach heated to 82° year-round.

For our two-day stay, we didn’t end up spending any time in the pool area. Our main focus was on the beach!

It’s nice to have the option to go for a swim, though. Monterey beaches are rugged and very cold. You can dip your toes in the water, but given the big waves and windy, foggy location, I wouldn’t recommend swimming at the beach.

The pool provides another option for those who want to take a dip. It’s an outdoor pool area and looked well-maintained with plenty of chairs to hang out and relax by the water.

The Evening Fire Pit Tradition

This was one of the coolest parts of our stay at the Sanctuary Beach Resort! The resort has a long-standing tradition of holding bonfires on the beach every night after sunset.

You can walk down from your room as the sun is setting, and you’ll find massive metal cauldrons arranged around the beach.

Staff members fill these with firewood and keep fires burning throughout the evening. Each fire pit is ringed with Adirondack chairs, so you can sit around the fire, sip some wine, and make s’mores.

Sitting on a windy beach, smelling wood smoke, roasting s’mores over a massive, cozy fire honestly felt like something out of a movie!

Couples on honeymoons and romantic retreats cuddled together around some of the fire pits and enjoyed the seclusion, while families like ours let their kids run up and down the sandy hills by the fire pits and gleefully roast marshmallow after marshmallow.

Salt Wood sells s’more kits with the traditional fixings – Jet-Puffed marshmallows, Hershey’s chocolate, and graham crackers.

They also provide big wooden roasting sticks, so you can make your s’mores at a safe distance from the crackling fires. If you run out of marshmallows, you can pick up your own s’more supplies at the Safeway nearby.

The fire pit experience is free, which is a fantastic perk. I’ve seen similar experiences offered at other beach resorts in California for hundreds of dollars.

The nightly bonfires were also a great opportunity to bring the hotel’s guests together in a communal setting. We ended up sharing fire pits with guests who had come to the hotel for years, and it was a great way to learn about tips for enjoying the beach (bring a kite), what to do if it gets foggy (bundle up, but expect it to burn off around 1pm), and simply to have a chance to chat with some of the other people enjoying their stay there.

If you brought a guitar with you, strumming it by the fire pit certainly wouldn’t feel out of place.

The nightly bonfires felt like a perfect way to capitalize on the beachside location, bring guests together, and extend the benefits of being right on the beach into the night. I honestly don’t know why every NorCal beach hotel doesn’t do this! It was one of the highlights of the stay, and itself a reason to come back to the Sanctuary Beach Resort.

What to Do Nearby in Monterey/Carmel

The Sanctuary Beach Resort encourages you to stay on property and enjoy being a bit separated from the bustle of daily life.

If you want to leave, though, there’s plenty to do in the Monterey area.

Your best bet is to drive about 20 minutes into downtown Monterey. There you’ll find Historic Cannery Row, complete with tons of shops and restaurants.

At the end of Cannery Row is the fantastic Monterey Bay Aquarium. This consistently ranks as one of the best aquariums in the world.

I’ve been at least 15 times over the years, so we didn’t end up going on this stay. It’s an absolutely fantastic place to visit, though, whether you’re traveling with kids or not.

Carmel and 17-Mile Drive are a short distance away. The little artist’s enclave is incredibly walkable, extremely dog-friendly, and has another lovely beach that’s definitely worth checking out. Pebble Beach is an iconic golf course.

Taylor Swift even dined at one of the restaurants here on a recent visit to Northern California.

The Verdict

Overall, we had an excellent stay at the Sanctuary Beach Resort in Monterey.

Again, I was expecting something more like a glamping experience, rather than a full luxury stay. Even by looking at the hotel’s website, it’s hard to get a full sense for how upscale the property is.

Upon actually traveling there, I was very pleasantly surprised by the beautifully appointed, luxurious room, and the overall luxurious feel of the resort.

This came out in little details, like the high-end binoculars in each room, and the way the hotel capitalizes on its stunning ocean views.

It also came out in bigger things, like the inclusion of a destination-quality restaurant on the property.

Although the Sanctuary Beach Resort is a smaller resort and doesn’t have the staff to offer as many services as you’d find at a bigger resort property, everyone there was extremely friendly, helpful, and oriented towards ensuring we had a great time.

Again, the room felt very new, spacious, and relaxing. The suite-style accommodation worked far better than I had expected for a family of five. And if you came here as a couples retreat – or even for yourself if you wanted to get some writing done or just disconnect for a while – the spacious and lovely rooms would be perfect for that.

Although the remote location made it a bit harder to find off-site food options, the excellent food at Salt Wood more than compensated. The room service meal was better than what I’ve gotten at many five-star luxury resorts, and eating in the dining room was festive, celebratory, and exciting, with the live fire crackling away.

Everything on the menu – from the grilled oysters to the steak, cocktails, and desserts – was mindfully prepared and delicious. I love when a restaurant can both provide the kind of high-end food that many California travelers expect, while also serving entrées that our young kids love to eat. Salt Wood absolutely succeeded in this.

Beyond the dinner and room service options, the beachside breakfast was an incredible experience, and felt like it really took advantage of the unique features of the resort. Serving the breakfast in a big wicker basket made it easy to bring to the beach, and gave an upscale picnic vibe that was absolutely perfect.

I liked how the services available at the hotel complemented its overall wellness emphasis and took advantage of the location.

The spa was great, the pool looked like a nice place for a swim, and playing a game of bocce outdoors or cuddling up with a board game in the central reception area around the big fire were the perfect ways to take advantage of the rugged natural location while still making the hotel feel very cozy.

Everything felt very easily accessible and walkable around the resort, and the golf cart drivers were always happy to come and get us – even with our boisterous pack of kids!

The absolute best thing about the Sanctuary Beach Resort, though, is its location. Staying steps away from the beach – or even right on it for some rooms – is a travel experience that feels very grounded in Northern California, and really made Sanctuary stand out.

Again, lots of beach resorts play up their coastal locations, but actually aren’t that accessible to the water. Here, we could walk out of our room and be flying a kite or running through the sand in under two minutes.

Many of the offerings at the hotel enhanced this proximity. The nightly bonfires were a beautiful and unique experience, and I was blown away that they were included for free with the stay.

The beachside breakfast and morning coffee by the water was perfect, too, but really just the proximity to the wind, surf, and sand makes the Sanctuary worth visiting, even absent all those other nice features.

I’d recommend the Sanctuary Beach Resort for families, as long as you don’t mind sharing the single-room accommodations. Everyone seemed extremely welcoming of kids, which isn’t always the case at luxury properties. It would also make a great destination for a couples trip, a private retreat, or even a team building retreat for an appropriately nature-oriented company.

This is a lovely property that embraces its location, but doesn’t rest on its laurels–although just being on the beach is reason enough to visit, the food options, friendly staff, upscale rooms and pool/spa both complement and enhance the beachside location.

Our kids are already asking to go back–this time with even more smores supplies!

You can book the Sanctuary Beach Resort on their website. Make reservations for Salt Wood here.