After nearly 90 years as a historic nudist resort, California’s Lupin Lodge is up for sale – and its next owners are likely to require guests to wear clothes.
The 112-acre Silicon Valley property became a retreat for members of the “naturist” movement in 1935. Today, its hundreds of members enjoy the resort’s clothing-optional hiking trails, pickleball court and its nude-only community pool. (Yes: the members really do hike naked.)
But the family-owned Los Gatos resort is now on sale for nearly $30m – and any buyers of the northern California property are likely to abandon its nudist roots.
When Pauline Martin Moore, 83, heard the property was going up for sale, “I was absolutely aghast,” she said.
Moore, who was born in London and has been part of the California club for decades, prizes it as a democratic social space, where typical markers of class and status drop away. “You don’t judge them by what they’re wearing, because you can’t, so you get to know people as they are,” she said.
At the same time, Moore said, she was not entirely surprised at the news of the sale: the upkeep of the resort is no easy job, and its owner and CEO, Lori Kay Stout, has been managing it on her own since her husband died in 2015.
Stout said her own health concerns and her desire to return to her work as an artist had prompted her to put the property up for sale last year. Over the decades, she said, the club had brought together “hundreds of people that met and married, or had long-term relationships”, including herself and her late husband.
“We raised our daughters at Lupin without body shame,” she added.
But, “to have a resort in Silicon Valley – limiting it to a niche market, clothing-optional nudists is not the most profitable or the best use of the property,” Stout said. “I think other clubs are finding that.”
Lupin’s likely transformation comes at a time when several California nudist destinations, from Olive Dell Ranch to DeAnza Springs, are “going textile”, as members of the community call it when a property that was once clothing-free returns to banning nudity.
“If they go textile, they have a broader clientele,” Stout said. That’s not because Americans are growing less interested in communal nakedness, she believes: “There’s a whole lot of nudists out there.” But the venues in which people want to be naked together are changing, from the nudist resorts popular with baby boomers to events such as Burning Man, which is “very nude friendly”, Stout said.
In September, Olive Dell Ranch made news headlines when a local resident was charged with murdering two of his elderly neighbors.
A group of Lupin Lodge’s dedicated members in Silicon Valley have tried to raise the funds to preserve the club as it is, but could not manage to obtain the financing they needed to buy it, said Joe Pollifrone of Christie’s International Real Estate.
“I’m 99% sure, once it sells, it’s going to no longer be a nudist resort,” he said.
Showing Lupin Lodge to prospective purchasers has at times been a colorful experience, Pollifrone said, though, he noted: “I always go with my clothes on.”
In early December, he gave a tour to two potential buyers from China and their real estate agent. He said he thought he had explained to the buyers’ realtor that Lupin Lodge was a nudist resort, but the message seemed to have gotten lost in translation.
Mid-tour, the realtor came up to him and whispered: “Joe, we just saw a naked man walking down the road.”
‘Golden era of nudism’
For dedicated American nudists, the potential sale of Lupin Lodge is “a huge loss”, as Carl Hild, a California resident who has written about the property, put it.
Evan Nix, a director at the Western Nudist Research Library, an archive based at one of southern California’s most prominent nudist resorts, called Lupin Lodge “a very historically relevant club”.
When the naturist movement, which originated in Germany, spread to the US in the 1930s, “California was definitely one of the early adopters, early places where these sort of clubs sprung up,” said Nix, who also founded and edits Planet Nude, a newsletter about the movement.
The nascent subculture was a topic of fascination for US newspapers in the 1930s, which published a cascade of articles about nudist leaders, nudist camps, and nudists defying various kinds of censorship. Almost a century on, it’s sometimes difficult to tell which of these news items are real, and which are a joke: did a forest fire outside of Los Angeles really chase “more than 100 nudists from their sylvan sports in an ‘Arcadia’ suntan camp, and burn up most of their clothes in passing”, as the Imperial Valley Press reported in September 1935?
While the nudists who founded the Bay Area-based Elysium Foundation had initially planned to open nudist health clubs across California, the property that would become Lupin Lodge was soon ensnared in financial troubles and changed hands and names several times, said Hild, who wrote about Lupin’s early history for Planet Nude.
Still, the property managed to survive as a nudist resort into what Nix called the “golden era of nudism” in the 1960s, when his great-grandfather, Rudolph Johnson, a leader of the American nudist movement, celebrated his wedding anniversary at Lupin Lodge in 1957.
Stout, Lupin’s current owner, said: “We survived the depression, World War II, barely, one earthquake, mudslides, fire [and] a con artist manager.”
The American Association for Nude Recreation, founded in 1931, still has an estimated 30,000 members nationwide, Nix said. But rising costs of real estate in California, coupled with a nudist movement that is “more and more niche”, has resulted in historic clubs up and down the state “going textile” or being put up for sale, he said.
Los Angeles county lost its last nudist resort, the Elysium Institute, in 2001, after the founder’s daughters decided to sell the original property over the protests of its members, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Under a new owner, Lupin Lodge might return to its pre-1930s history as a vineyard, or be transformed into a high-end rehab center, a luxury RV park or a wedding venue, Pollifrone, the property’s realtor, said. At least one school in the Bay Area has explored purchasing the property as an additional campus or retreat space, he said.
“We’ve been sending thousands of emails to all sorts of different people,” Pellicone said. “No corporate resort yet has hit us up for it.”
The realtor said it was not surprising that the property had been on the market for a year already. “It’s just so unique,” he said. “And it’s going to take somebody with a lot of money because it does need some renovation.”
Moore, the Lupin Lodge member from Britain, said that if some tech billionaire emerged to preserve the historic nudist landmark, and “wanted a place as a tax write-off, that would be brilliant”.
“It’s wonderful to be free of restrictive clothing, and just be able to lie in the sun,” she said.
