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[MinnieMouse]

Not all rooms are ready in Santa Fe, till summer it will be finish completely with the cars theming.

[esmeralda]

Any updates yet? I guess they're almost finished, so i'm very curious on how it looks now!!!

[torstendlp]

We have just made  a little stroll through Hotel Santa Fe last week and so far NOT all rooms are ready - we saw quite some rooms/hallways with ongoing renovations works - and through open curtains we could also see some rooms that still had the old look.

There something I overall would like to say about the Cars-concept for Santa Fe:
I loved Predock's original concept.
I could live with the repainted buildings in contrast to the original look, even if this already broke up with Predock's concept.
I could even live with the rooms being themed after Cars, cause the rooms never really were part of Predock's great concept.
But adding parts of a Cars-Theming to the outside areas, too (besides the now stupid version on the movie screen over the main building) is just ridiculous.
After starting with this, they can only get this done right, if they retheme the whole outside are after Cars from scratch, to a Radiator Springs setting.
Adding some elements here and there will in the end result in a complete mixed-up something being far away from any consistent theming.
Horrible - imho they are destroying this hotel like they did with Gehry's great idea for Festival Disney. Nowadays the Village is nothing more than a senseless mixture of entertainment locations without any soul and heart and concept.
And this is how Santa Fe will end up, too.
At HNY they stopped early enough and kept the damage that was done to the concept by repainting the central towers from blue to red/brown to a minimum.
But changing Santa Fe's outisde to a Cars theme will not only destroy this hotel's concept but also the concept of the whole original hotel district (besides DLH) whichs intention always was to keep Disney/Character-Elements out of the area while still delivering well themened hotels that also were interesting from an achitectural point of view.
A few days ago I just read again through the special issue of the "Conaissance des Arts" magazine from 1992 for ED opening and already got kind of sad, seeing again how many great ideas from the original Village/Hotel-district-concept, the architects invested so many thoughts in, are simply getting washed away. Doing so, they could have saved an awfull lot of money by doing the hotels trough Imagineering from the beginning instead of hiring such fantastic architects like Stern, Graves, Gehry etc. when they are now destroying their work anyway....