If you bought into The Colony at Mandalay Beach for the clubhouse packet, you know it by heart: two pools, six spas, tennis and racquetball courts, a fitness center, three gated Spanish-style sections built out between 1984 and 1987. That list hasn't changed much in forty years, and it isn't going to. HOA amenities age the way HOA amenities age. What has changed, dramatically, in the last four years, is everything just past your property line.
Most of it happened without a single Colony resident voting on it, because none of it required a vote. It happened at the resort next door and on the beach in front of it, and if you haven't walked over there lately, you're operating on an old map.
The Resort Next Door Got Rebuilt From the Studs
For most of The Colony's history, the neighboring hotel was the Embassy Suites Mandalay Beach Resort, a reliable but unremarkable oceanfront property. That ended on October 1, 2022, when RLJ Lodging Trust relaunched it as Zachari Dunes on Mandalay Beach, a Curio Collection hotel by Hilton, following what the company described as a multi-million-dollar renovation and full brand conversion. The name is a nod to Henry Oxnard, the sugar beet magnate who founded the city and once planned to name the settlement after the Greek word for sugar. It's also a description of the dunes themselves, which the resort's own marketing points out shift and drift the same way sugar does.
This wasn't a paint job. In the announcement, RLJ's CEO said the company expected the conversion to outperform the 40-plus percent internal rate of return it had underwritten going in, which is the kind of number that tells you a company thought hard about the math before committing capital, not just the design. The 250-suite property came out the other side with a rebuilt lobby, a new outdoor plaza with fire pits, and three new ways to spend an afternoon that didn't exist under the old flag: Ox & Ocean, a full restaurant built around Oxnard Plain produce and Pacific seafood; Sugar Beats, a converted Airstream trailer pouring coffee by day and canned cocktails by afternoon; and Henry's Sundries and Gear Rental, a lobby storefront that lends out bikes, boogie boards, and paddle gear so nobody has to haul their own down from the garage.
None of that shows up in a Colony HOA newsletter. All of it is a shorter walk from your unit than the harbor.
The Beach Got a New Name, and It Wasn't the Hotel's Idea
The stretch of sand between Zachari Dunes and the Oxnard Shores neighborhood, the same one Colony residents have always used to get to the water, used to be called Oxnard Beach Park. In April 2023, the Oxnard City Council voted unanimously to rename it 'olołkoy Beach Park, using the Chumash word for dolphin. The sign went up that September, unveiled at a Saturday morning ceremony on Harbor Boulevard.
The effort didn't come from the city or the resort. It started with a resident named Manuel Herrera, who spent about a year building a committee of neighbors and Chumash tribal members before bringing the idea to the council. At the unveiling, Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie put the moment in context.
"Being here today shows people that we are still here still thriving and being part of the community."
If you've lived in The Colony a while, you've probably still called it Oxnard Beach Park without thinking twice, the way people keep calling a renamed street by its old name for a decade. Worth updating the habit. The park itself hasn't changed physically. It's still the same 62 acres of rolling lawn, dune walkways, and a pirate-ship playground, with a path connecting Oxnard Shores to Channel Islands Beach and a separate walkway over to Channel Islands Harbor, all of it sitting along the California Coastal Trail and the Pacific Coast Bicycle Route. What changed is whose history is attached to it.
Three Years Running, and Almost Nobody Brought It Up
Here's the part that actually surprised me. 'olołkoy Beach Park has been named USA Today's number one beach on the entire West Coast in its 10Best Readers' Choice Awards for three consecutive years: 2023, 2024, and 2025. Not top ten. Not a regional shortlist. Number one on the West Coast, three years straight, against every beach from San Diego to Seattle.
I'd bet most people who live at The Colony don't know that streak exists, because nobody local tends to mention it. It's the kind of thing that gets repeated in tourism marketing and skipped entirely in neighborhood conversation, which is backwards. A three-year national ranking on the beach outside your gate is a bigger deal than most of what actually gets talked about at the pool.
What a Saturday Actually Looks Like Now
Put the pieces together and the walking radius from The Colony has quietly turned into something with real range to it:
- Coffee from Sugar Beats before the beach opens up for the day
- A rental board or bike from Henry's instead of hauling your own down from storage
- An afternoon at 'olołkoy, on a beach with an actual national title attached to it
- Happy hour at Ox & Ocean on the way back
- A short ride over to Red Tandem Brewery or a family outing on Wheel Fun Rentals bikes if you're headed toward the harbor side instead
None of this existed in its current form when a lot of current owners bought their unit. The resort was a different hotel under a different flag. The beach had a different name and no accolades attached to it. The gear rental didn't exist. If your mental map of the neighborhood is more than four years old, it's not wrong, it's just incomplete.
The Part Worth Sitting With
Two different things happened to The Colony's amenity base at the same time. The HOA-controlled side, the pools and spas and tennis courts, aged normally, maintained on schedule, unchanged in substance since the Reagan administration. The side outside the gate got a multi-million-dollar capital infusion from a public lodging REIT and a community-driven renaming that pulled in a three-year national ranking, and none of it cost the association a dollar or required a special assessment.
That's not a small distinction if you ever think about what makes a place hold up over time. A clubhouse depreciates. A restaurant, a coffee cart, and a nationally recognized beach a short walk away don't show up on a reserve study, but they're doing real work for how the neighborhood actually functions day to day. I track this kind of thing closely because it's the part of a home's value that never makes it into a listing sheet, the context around the four walls rather than the walls themselves.
If you're at The Colony and haven't walked over to see what changed, it's worth the ten minutes. And if you're ever curious how any of this factors into what your unit is actually worth in this market, or just want to talk through what's happening in Oxnard's coastal pockets more broadly, I'm easy to find. Homes by Billy is one call away.
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