Westerly — Living in neighboring Stonington, Meg Lyons had driven past the Ocean House many times but had never been inside.

That was until her firm, Centerbrook Architects and Planners of Centerbrook, was hired to design the new Ocean House and she was named the project manager.

Now, she knows the place as well as her own house as she and other members of Centerbrook design team have agonized over the smallest details, ranging from the color and look of the molding in the Club Room to the size of the small pebbles on the shower floors, as they recreated a classic 19th-century Victorian hotel that incorporates the amenities of a 21st-century luxury resort.

They even tested 10 shades of yellow paint before finding the exact color of the old hotel.

"There is not a square inch of this building that was not thought about very carefully," Lyons said during a recent tour of the hotel.

After Charles Royce bought the dilapidated hotel, he brought in Centerbrook to see if it could be renovated or had to be torn down and be replaced.

Lyons said that previous owners had taken down walls between rooms and cut up studs to add wiring, plumbing and bathrooms. When Centerbrook opened up walls they found that the trusses that supported the massive edifice had been weakened. In other places floors had buckled, windows wouldn't close and, from the outside, the building visibly sagged. The north wing was sitting on sand while 75 code violations had to be addressed.

"Structurally, it was a mess," she said.

To fix all the structural problems, Lyons said crews would have had to remove all of the exterior and interior of the building leaving just some of the original beams.

The decision was made to replicate the original building.

"But first we spent a large amount of time documenting the old building," Lyons said.

Photographs and laser measurements were taken of the entire hotel both inside and out while patterns were made of existing molding and other features, such as the fluted columns in the lobby, so they could be reproduced in the new building.

Each of the thousand or so stones that comprised the massive lobby fireplace were numbered, mapped and stored so they could be reassembled in the new hotel.

"We took actual elements from the old hotel and reused them in the new one," she said. "For example this is the same front door that people walked though in 1868."

In all, about 5,000 pieces of the old hotel were saved to either be reused or to serve as models for new pieces.

The lobby desk and the wooden mailbox behind it where handwritten messages can still be left for guests were put back in place as were the fanlight doors across the room.

The surround from the old dining room fireplace now serves as the border around a large bar that serves the ballroom. One guest room contains the entire wood ceiling removed from a room in the old hotel.

"We made a huge effort to replicate not only the elements of the building but also the spirit of the building," Lyons said. "This has been a huge effort. Mr. Royce has been very involved all the way along and has been very focused on the details. You can't create a building like this unless you are focused on the details."

At the height of the project, Lyons said Centerbrook had 15 people working on the design.

"We designed every floor, every wall, every light fixture. Everything was considered," she said.

This includes color, textures and materials and how they meshed with each other.

Even the stairwells are attractive with an interlocking O and H pattern as part of the railing.

"Mr. Royce likes to take the stairs so he wanted them to be nice," said Dinah Saglio, the hotel's communications director.

As for the 23 residences, Lyons said working on each one is like designing an individual house. If an owner wants to place their unit in the rental pool, however, they have to conform to certain standards.

For Centerbrook, which has worked on numerous institutional, hotel and historic preservation projects, the Ocean House was a unique endeavor as there are few Victorian hotels being turned into five-star hotels.

"There was an overlap for us, but there's only one Ocean House," Lyons said.