The Ocean View in Oak Bluffs, where generations of Islanders met for family dinners, date nights and drinks before it burned to the ground in 2022, will not be rising from its ashes as a restaurant, according to a new proposal from property owners Charles (Chuck) Hajjar and Charles Hajjar.

At a Martha’s Vineyard Commission land use planning committee meeting Monday night, the Hajjars’ attorney Cass Luskin unveiled plans for the Ocean View Hotel, a 26-room, three-story seasonal lodging place with employee housing, an outdoor pool and fire pit — but no public restaurant or bar.

“There’s no more restaurant use proposed in this plan,” Mr. Luskin said.

The new development replaces an earlier application for a three-story, four-level building with a ground-floor restaurant, a basement bakery and workforce housing upstairs, which was filed for MVC review in January of 2024.

Mr. Luskin said the costs of rebuilding on the burnt-out site require an enterprise that brings in more revenue than the existing contract with restaurateur Michael Santoro, who owned the Ocean View restaurant.

A look at past iterations of the Ocean View. — Mark Alan Lovewell

“It may have been an appropriate amount of money for the original building … but it wouldn’t have covered even the construction costs or the costs of getting the money from banks in order to construct with a new building,” Mr. Luskin said.

The burned building’s insurance settlement also fell short, he said.

“There wasn’t as much money coming from insurance as would have been expected, partially just because of the age and the status of that building in that lot,” Mr. Luskin said, noting the old Ocean View’s advanced age and design limitations.

The new proposal would make rebuilding economically feasible, he said, and revive a historic use of the prominent East Chop site where the three-story Ocean View House, later renamed Ocean View Hotel, hosted summer visitors from the late 1800s until it was leveled by fire in 1965.

A seasonal hotel also would contribute far less wastewater and vehicle traffic to the area than a restaurant, Mr. Luskin said.

In an interview with the Gazette Tuesday, Mr. Santoro said he was disappointed in the new plan because he had been working with the Hajjar family on a proposal to rebuild the restaurant. He had signed a contract with a restaurant designer and had been paying to renew his old licenses. Mr. Santoro said he never heard directly from the Hajjar family about the change.

“I'm disappointed,” he said. “We'd been moving forward. Mr. Hajjar after the fire had 60 days to terminate the lease and he didn't and from that point on he was very excited about building the restaurant and having the restaurant there.”

Along with its guest rooms, the new Ocean View Hotel would build three basement apartments for employees, Mr. Luskin said, adding that it may be possible to make them available to others in the off-season.

Including all four levels, the new hotel would have 18,543 square feet of space, according to the proposal.

Mr. Luskin said the business would be run by Lark Hotels, which operates the nearby Summercamp, the Coonamessett in Falmouth and more than 20 other boutique hotels in New England, North Carolina and California.

Past memories of the old hotel. — Courtesy Boston Public Library

Based on Summercamp’s experience, he said, the Hajjars are planning just 16 parking places for the hotel.

“They found that they were getting one car for every 17 guests at their property, which is shockingly low,” said Mr. Luskin, who attributed the finding to the proximity of multiple passenger ferry lines on Oak Bluffs harbor.

Architect Peter Gearhart is designing the new hotel to evoke the 19th-century era when the original Ocean View was in its heyday, Mr. Luskin said.

“It looks a lot like these grand Victorian hotels that used to exist in Oak Bluffs, and in fact, existed on this very spot,” he said.

At Monday’s meeting, the land use planning committee gave Mr. Luskin and Mr. Gearhart a preview of the questions they will be expected to answer when the full commission holds its public hearing on the project later this year.

Commissioners on the committee asked for more details on parking, landscaping, lighting, drainage and the basement employee housing, among other elements of the proposal. 

They also noted that the impacts on neighboring properties should be minimized at the Ocean View site, which was spot-zoned for business in 1948 and is almost entirely surrounded by residential property.

Martha’s Vineyard Commission coordinator Richard Saltzberg said the earliest date for a public hearing on the Ocean View Hotel would be in June.

In the meantime, the land use planning committee directed MVC staff planner Michael Mauro to conduct a study on potential traffic impacts from the proposed development.

Addison Antonoff contributed to this article.