Two contractors, a road trip and a motel built to be cleaned quickly.

Motel 6 began in Santa Barbara, California, in 1962. Its founders, William Becker and Paul Greene, were Santa Barbara contractors when they decided to build motels offering rooms at bargain rates, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2007, and the original motel stood near East Beach. English Wikipedia, citing a 1964 article in the Santa Barbara News-Press, dates the opening to 1 June 1962. The Santa Barbara Independent noted in 2007 that the chain was named after its original nightly rate, and the Times described how the partners weighed lower figures before settling on the one that gave the motel its number.

The Times traced the idea to a month-long, cross-country car trip that Becker made in the summer of 1960, from Santa Barbara to his family’s farm in Greenwich, New York. His son, Tod Becker, told the paper that his father found high prices and poor lodging along the way and asked why nobody built a nice motel with clean rooms at a budget price. The partners already had a background in building low-cost tract homes in the Lompoc area, and, according to a 1967 Newsweek story quoted by the Times, they built the motels with their own crews and equipment.

Design followed the arithmetic. The Times said Becker and Greene eliminated dressers, replaced closets with clothes racks and built shower stalls with rounded edges rather than corners to reduce cleaning time; they used no-iron sheets and foam drinking cups, and the televisions were coin-operated. Greene told the News-Press in 1962 that “this is the type of simple accommodation needed by travelers with families.” Wikipedia adds that the Santa Barbara motel had no restaurant on site and that early rooms were given functional interior decor so that they could be cleaned quickly.

The roadside sign mattered from the start. The 1967 Newsweek story, as summarised by the Times, said a Motel 6 advertising sign in Santa Barbara was repeatedly torn down, and that in Reno the partners went to federal court to overturn a city ordinance that prohibited them from advertising their room rate. Wikipedia says the chain reached downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1965, its opening beyond California, and that by 1967, the Times reported, Motel 6 ran motels across California and several other Western states.

An investment group, KKR, Accor, Blackstone and OYO.

Becker and Greene did not keep the business for long. English Wikipedia says they sold the chain to an investment group in 1968; Kohlberg Kravis Roberts bought it in 1985 and began adding telephones and colour television, and the French hotel group Accor bought it in 1990. Accounts of when franchising began are dated differently: Wikipedia gives 1994, while Motel 6 said in an October 1997 statement that it had begun selectively franchising in 1996. Wikipedia dates the launch of Studio 6, the extended-stay line with kitchenettes, to 1999, and the chain’s arrival in Canada, at Burlington, Ontario, to 2000.

In 2012 Accor sold Motel 6 to The Blackstone Group, which said it would run the chain on a stand-alone basis, according to Wikipedia, which cites the press releases issued by both companies that year. The chain and Studio 6 were grouped under a parent company, G6 Hospitality, which Wikipedia places in Plano, Texas. Reuters reported in December 2025 that OYO, a unit of the India-based company Prism, formerly Oravel Stays, bought Motel 6 from Blackstone Real Estate in December 2024; Wikipedia dates the completion to 17 December 2024 and says OYO then appointed Sonal Sinha as chief executive of G6 Hospitality.

The rooms changed shape under Blackstone. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in March 2016, Terry Gardner described a renovation programme that the company called the Phoenix Project: “Out with the colorful bed covers printed with road-trip inspired cars and cactus. In with bold orange, turquoise or lime green accent walls and blankets.” The updated rooms, she wrote, had pedestal beds, flat-screen televisions, wood-like floors instead of carpet, and bathrooms with a walk-in shower and a sink set in a black granite counter, while lobbies and exteriors were also getting face-lifts. Lance Miceli, chief marketing officer of G6 Hospitality, explained to the paper how guests could find the renovated motels online. Wikipedia dates the start of the Phoenix Project to March 2008 and says the renovated rooms were designed to be easier to clean and keep clean.

The Santa Barbara motel is part of the brand’s own story. Wikipedia carries a photograph of it from about 2006, notes that it was still in business, and says the chain marked its 40th anniversary there in 2002.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are motel and economy hotel names: chains of roadside and city lodgings, many of them run by franchisees under a name owned by another company. A brand of this kind lives in a sequence of physical places rather than in a single package, and each place carries the name in a different way.

The pylon sign is one of them: a tall post or panel set beside a highway or an exit ramp, designed to be read from a moving car and often lit after dark, so a wordmark and its colours have to work at a distance. Closer in, a canopy over the entrance, a sign on the building itself and the lobby door repeat the mark at a smaller scale. Inside, the front desk, the key card, the room directory and the linen take the same name into the room. Some chains add a mascot, which can appear on signs and in advertising alike.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding, its owners and franchisors, and changes to its name, sign and identity — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A numeral, two colours and a voice on the radio.

The Motel 6 identity rests on a numeral and two colours. In a statement dated 13 October 1997, Motel 6 said it had redesigned its logo with a more contemporary look while keeping “the familiar blue and red colors and bright No. 6” that guests associated with the chain. The company said the new mark was designed by SBG Partners of San Francisco, that consumer research was carried out by Perception Research Services of Fort Lee, New Jersey, with groups of guests and non-guests in several regions, and that their responses helped select the logo. Tab Sims, then the chain’s director of corporate identification, described it as a signal that Motel 6 was changing. The company said the logo would be rolled out in stages, first at renovated motels, and that any new company-owned or franchised property would display it automatically.

Part of the brand is spoken rather than drawn. Since 1986, Wikipedia says, Motel 6 has advertised with radio commercials narrated by the writer and National Public Radio commentator Tom Bodett, closing on the line “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Wikipedia credits the commercials to the Dallas advertising agency The Richards Group and says the first spots were conceived and written by David Fowler. Reuters reported in December 2025 that Bodett had been the chain’s lead spokesman since 1986 and that he said he had ad-libbed the tagline.

Bodett sued Motel 6 in June 2025 over the continued use of his name and voice, and Reuters reported in December 2025 that the case had been settled on undisclosed terms.

Inside the rooms, the brand has been expressed through colour as much as through the sign. The 2016 Los Angeles Times account of the Phoenix Project rooms, with their orange, turquoise or lime-green accent walls and blankets set against wood-like floors, shows how the chain moved from printed road-trip motifs to blocks of flat colour.

For a design guide, Motel 6 shows how a number, two colours and a single spoken line can carry a roadside brand through six decades of changing owners, with the sign doing the work that a lobby does elsewhere. Compare it with Red Roof Inn, which Accor owned alongside Motel 6 from 1999 to 2007, and Super 8, another chain named after its room rate. For this guide we use sign blue, sign red and porch light with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Motel 6’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.