In 1923, Edward Drummond Libbey, a wealthy Ohio glass manufacturer and philanthropist, commissioned California architect Wallace Neff to build the Ojai Country Club in the Spanish Colonial architectural style. From its earliest days, guests felt the Inn was an escape, a sequestered yet sophisticated getaway that gave them the sense of being on their own private country estate. And ever since 1937, when Frank Capra used the sweeping mountain vistas of the valley as Shangri-La in his film Lost Horizon, the valley has become synonymous with mystical beauty and hidden enchantment. A different kind of notoriety distinguished the inn in 1942 when it was transformed into Camp Oak for a military training center for the Army, and later for the U.S. Navy, which used the grounds for a rest and recuperation facility.
