20-Story Resort Hotel to Rise by Sea in Huntington Beach : Redevelopment: The $115-million structure, tallest on the Orange County Coast, is part of plans to transform the beach city to an upscale tourist haven.

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  A development firm revealed plans Monday for a $115-million, 20-story hotel that would be the tallest structure along the Orange County coast.

The 500-room hotel, a key part of this beach town’s redevelopment, is the second of four resort hotels planned for a half-mile-long development on Pacific Coast Highway known as The Waterfront.

The developer, a partnership called the Waterfront Inc., which includes prominent builder Robert Mayer, hopes to begin the hotel’s construction in December and finish in late 1992, said Stephen K. Bone, president of the venture.

The project is part of a major redevelopment that is transforming the city’s beachfront from a funky, casual surfer’s haven to an upscale resort. While some neighborhood activists fret about the change, boosters say it will help the city hold its own against the snazzy hotels in nearby beach towns.

“Huntington Beach is a city of 200,000 with very few amenities,” said Bone, a former lawyer. “The city has always been the hole in the doughnut of economic development. Now it’s starting to come together.”

The Waterfront is a $600-million project on a triangle-shaped, 50-acre parcel just across Pacific Coast Highway from the beach between Beach Boulevard and Huntington Street, just south of the Huntington Beach Pier. Its four hotels will have 1,450 hotel rooms by completion in 1996.

The new hotel, which will probably be a Sheraton, will be built on the current site of the two-story Best Western Huntington Beach Inn. That structure will be torn down to make way for the new hotel.

The hotel proposal will be presented for approval to the city’s Planning Commission in August. As proposed, it will tower above surrounding buildings. The tallest structure on the county’s coast now is the 18-story Union Bank Building at Newport Center in Newport Beach. That building is owned by The Irvine Co.

The first of the four hotels at The Waterfront--the $55-million, 300-room Waterfront Hilton--opens next week. On Monday workers were scurrying about, putting the finishing touches on the 12-story, Mediterranean-style building, which is surfaced with stucco and roofed with tile.

The developer is also planning to build an all-suites hotel--estimated at 250 rooms--by 1994. Then a fourth hotel--the most elegant of the four, with 450 rooms--will be constructed at the corner of Beach Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway and opened in 1996.

Part of the Waterfront is being built on an existing nine-hole golf course. The project will also displace a group of residents now living in mobile homes at the end of the property farthest from the beach. The developer plans to build nearly 875 houses and condominiums on those 23 acres, which it is buying from the city for $10 million plus the costs of resettling the residents.

The land under the hotels along Pacific Coast Highway is also city-owned. It is leased to the developers for 99 years. Since there is a considerable amount of risk and extra expense--such as building underground parking--involved in the massive project, Bone said, the city is charging a flat rent for the land for the first 25 years. After that there’s a clause that allows the city to take a percentage of the hotels’ revenues, Bone said, as some cities do with ballparks and other private uses of public land.

The newest hotel will be more in the Italian style than the Hilton, Bone said. It will have an off-white plaster exterior and a tile roof. The exterior will alternate one unadorned story with two-story columns separating the windows on every second and third floor. The architect is Frizzell Hill Associates, a prominent San Francisco firm that has designed many resorts.

The hotel will adjoin a three-story fitness center that will be built at the same time. There will also be a footbridge over the four lanes of Pacific Coast Highway to the beach.

Although hotel experts say a golf course is often essential to the success of a resort, the developers say the broad, sandy beach across Pacific Coast Highway will more than make up for the lack of a nearby golf course. And golfers will also be able to use nearby courses, the developers say.

“All a hotel in the desert has, for instance, is its golf course,” said Alan Ayres, general manager of the Hilton. “We’ll be offering a lot more than golf.”

Ayres said that to break even the Hilton, managed by a Dallas concern called Signet Management, must reach 63% occupancy while getting an average daily room rate of $128. (Without corporate discounts, the rooms start at $145 for a single and $160 for a double.)

The hotel should hit that goal next year, Ayres said. The hotel has already booked a lot of business meetings, which will make up most of its business except in the summer, when leisure travelers are expected to predominate.

While the local hotel business is in a slump, that is mostly due to a decline in business travel, say hotel experts, and hotels that cater to tourists are doing much better.

Meanwhile, the adjoining areas are rapidly changing too. Across Huntington Street from the new Hilton, the Huntington Beach Co. is tearing down businesses along Pacific Coast Highway to build a retailing center to which it hopes to lure pricey stores like Gucci. It will also build homes along the back end of its property.

And a new building is planned for the area around the storm-damaged Huntington Beach Pier, which is being replaced and will have a park-like plaza at its base.

Bone said Mayer is putting up money to acquire the land. Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, the big Japanese bank, is lending the money for construction and will hold the mortgage.