Venice Beach is known around the world.
The boardwalk. The surfers. Muscle Beach. Skate culture. Artists. Street performers. Million-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific.
But there is another Venice story that many visitors never hear.
Black people helped build it.
Today, just steps from the beach, two Black entrepreneurs are making sure that history isn’t forgotten—and they’re doing it through an unexpected medium:
A hotel.
The Redline Venice, founded by Kamau Coleman and Michael Clinton, is a four-suite Black-owned boutique property that combines accommodations with history, art and cultural storytelling.
But Redline’s story is becoming bigger than one small hotel near the beach.
The founders are now using Venice as the foundation for something much more ambitious: a Black-owned hospitality brand built around reclaiming history in communities that were once shaped by exclusion.
Why Call a Hotel “The Redline”?
The name is intentionally uncomfortable.
Redlining was the discriminatory housing practice that helped prevent generations of Black families and other marginalized communities from obtaining mortgages and building wealth in certain American neighborhoods.
Venice was not untouched by that history.
Black residents, workers, artists and entrepreneurs contributed to the community while simultaneously confronting discrimination in housing and access to the California coastline.
So when Coleman and Clinton began developing their hospitality concept, they didn’t try to erase that history.
They built the brand around confronting it.
The Redline Hotel Group describes its mission as transforming places historically associated with exclusion into hospitality experiences centered around culture, community and belonging.
A Black-Owned Hotel Steps From Venice Beach | Check Listing
The building itself carries another interesting piece of the story.
According to Coleman, the property had previously belonged to a Black owner who acquired real estate in the area decades earlier. The building eventually became dormant before Coleman and Clinton took on the project and invested more than $1 million into its transformation.
Instead of creating another conventional beach hotel, they developed what Redline now calls a:
“museum guesthouse.”
There are only four accommodations.
Beat by the Sea sleeps two.
The Escape is a one-bedroom suite accommodating up to four.
12 Miles West offers two bedrooms.
And The Canvas, the largest, provides three bedrooms and accommodates up to six guests.
Each uses design, photographs, artwork and storytelling to introduce guests to different parts of Venice’s cultural history.
The result feels somewhere between a boutique hotel, apartment stay and small museum.
The Black History Hiding Behind Venice Beach
Perhaps the most interesting part of Redline isn’t what guests sleep on.
It’s what they discover while they’re there.
One of the figures highlighted by the property is Arthur Reese, a Black entrepreneur, inventor and designer from New Orleans who worked closely with Venice founder Abbot Kinney in the early 20th century. Reese became an important figure in the development of the community and led one of Venice’s earliest Black families.
Another is Nick Gabaldón, widely recognized as the first documented surfer of African American and Mexican American descent in California’s Santa Monica Bay.
Gabaldón learned to surf around the historically Black section of Santa Monica Beach commonly remembered as The Inkwell, sometimes paddling miles north toward Malibu.
Redline also highlights artists, activists and community figures whose contributions are easily missed by travelers walking today’s Venice Boardwalk.
That storytelling is intentional.
Instead of putting local history in a brochure at the front desk, Redline puts it inside the guest experience.
A Hotel About Reclaiming Space
There’s another layer to the story.
Venice today contains some of the most expensive real estate in Los Angeles.
The same communities where discriminatory housing practices once limited Black property ownership have experienced extraordinary appreciation and gentrification.
That makes the presence of a Black-owned hotel near Venice Beach particularly significant.
Redline isn’t merely telling visitors that Black people once lived here.
Black entrepreneurs own a hospitality business here now.
That distinction is central to what Coleman and Clinton are building.
For them, hospitality becomes a way of preserving history while simultaneously creating ownership and economic participation in communities where Black wealth was historically restricted.
Venice Was the Proof. Now Comes the Hotel Brand | Check Listing
And this is where the Redline story gets particularly interesting.
The Venice property appears to have validated the concept.
Redline Hotel Group currently reports $420,000 in first-year revenue, a $346 average daily rate and occupancy above 75%, along with more than 110 five-star reviews. The company also says previous national media exposure produced a 200% surge in bookings. These figures are company-reported rather than independently audited, but they help explain why the founders are thinking beyond Venice.
Their current roadmap describes Venice as the “proof.”
Now they want to build the brand.
Redline says it is exploring expansion into cities including Inglewood and New Orleans, followed eventually by a broader franchise strategy. The company is also preparing a community-centered investment initiative connected to that growth.
That means the four-suite property in Venice could ultimately represent something considerably larger:
the first hotel in a new Black-owned hospitality brand.
Why Redline Matters to Black Travel | Check Listing
Black travelers increasingly have opportunities to think about more than simply where they’re going.
There’s also the question of who owns the places where we spend our travel dollars—and whose stories those places tell.
The Redline Venice brings those ideas together unusually well.
You can stay steps from one of America’s most famous beaches.
You can support a Black-owned hospitality business.
And somewhere between checking in and heading toward the Pacific, you might discover that the history of Venice Beach looks different from the version you thought you knew.
That’s what makes The Redline interesting.
It’s not simply putting Black history inside a hotel.
It’s using Black hotel ownership to make sure that history still has a place in the neighborhood.
