From Hurley Bell to Five Crowns

​Corona Del Mar’s oldest restaurant, known today as Five Crowns was built in 1936 by Matilda “Tillie” Lemon MacCulloch.  An American wife of a wealthy Scotsman, she lived in England but had grown up visiting Southern California as a child.  She modeled it after Ye Olde Bell, an inn at Hurley-on-Thames, 35 miles west of London, England and called it the Hurley Bell.   Local architect Shelby Coon used photographs of the inn to design it.  Originally planned to be an inn, the MacCullochs ended up making it their home.  

Matilda MacCulloch, 1900. (Credit: Marguerite Atkinson Collection, Sherman Library.)

​Shelton McHenry and Bruce Warren who ran the Tail o’ the Cock Restaurant in Los Angeles leased it for a new location in 1943 but it would only last for 3 years.  Tillie and her daughter would revitalize the Hurley Inn for a few years until Tillie’s death in 1948.  

After leasing it to a series of unsuccessful entrepreneurs, the restaurant was leased to the Frank and Van de Kamp families and was re-modeled and re-opened as the Five Crowns in 1965.  It continues to operate today, having been purchased by Lawry’s Food Corporation in the 1980s.