PALM SPRINGS
California’s desert gem appeals to hip, new crowd
WITH A LONG HISTORY OF TIES to Hollywood and a modern return to form via a “cool redux,” this desert city comes by its Mad Men ethos honestly.
I land in Palm Springs, and even with a quick stop for the date milkshake friends told me I had to try “right off the plane,” I’m lying by my hotel pool within an hour.
The desert scene around me is beyond postcard: San Jacinto mountain range, blue skies and palm fronds fanning me. Fly Me to the Moon plays on the sound system. Scattered around the deck are copies of Atomic Ranch, a magazine devoted to 1950s and ’60s modernist American homes.
I take off my watch. Less because I’m on vacation than because I’m no longer in the present.
It’s all mid-century all the time at the Orbit Inn, where rooms are named Atomic Paradise and BossaNovaVille and staff mix Orbitinis for martini hour around the poolside boomerang bar. But it’s not just at the hotel. The retro vibe is so ubiquitous in Palm Springs you half expect to bump into Joey Bishop in the supermarket aisle.
Palm Springs comes by this Mad Men ethos honestly. Early Hollywood put the desert town on the map. About 175 kilometres east of L.A., Palm Springs allowed movie stars to abide by the studios’ “Two Hour Rule:” actors had to be within two hours of the set in case the director called. But its heyday was the mid-century, when it became the desert playground of the Rat Pack. Frank, Dean and Sammy were as ubiquitous as the palm trees lining the main drag.
By the 1970s, golf club wielding retirees had taken over and the town became known as God’s Waiting Room.
Palm Springs’ current “cool redux” is chalked up to its wealth of mid-century modern houses and hotels, possibly the most important collection in the U.S., with whole neighbourhoods like Tennis Club and Movie Colony being bought and restored.
On the cloudless morning after I arrive, I board a minivan taking me on a tour of this architectural legacy. Our guide, Robert Imber, Palm Springs’ straw fedora-clad, foremost mid-century modern preservation fanatic, points up to a mountain telling us about the extraordinary oyster-shaped mansion at the top. He refers to it as the Lautner house, after the architect who designed it, and everyone in the van “oohs” in appreciation. If we were tourists other than design lovers, Imber might have tried to impress us with the house’s other identity: Bob Hope’s Palm Spring residence.
In February, the city is crawling with architecture geeks like us, when official celebration of the cool-era style takes place with Palm Springs Modernism Week.
It’s retro mambo parties, serious lectures, and tours of houses designed by desert modernist architects such as Richard Neutra, E. Stewart Williams and William F. Cody. These architects are rock stars for Modernism Week attendees who also make sure to snap iconic architectural photographer Julius Shulman’s star on the Walk of Fame.
Best of all, Modernism Week is a chance to peek into otherwise off-limits, architectural gems such as Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs hideaway.
Aboard our van cliques form, like in high school; Fans of Cody sit next to each other avoiding Neutra kids. Imber teaches us the esthetic sequence of this maverick architecture, repeating it like a mantra — Garage. Breezeway. Windows. Wall — as we press our noses against the window of his van.
“Everything was new then. Everything was exciting,” he tells our group, about this most optimistic time in American history. The Palm Springs esthetic sprouted from this feel-good time with inventive architects adapting new materials and modern construction techniques to serve a clientele willing to live in experiments.
Of all the houses we only pass by and can’t get in to look at, the Neutra-designed Kauffman house, a vanguard of postwar modernism, is the most tantalizing. But we all get out to pose in front of the striking steel and glass house, set against an elemental backdrop of boulders and scrubby cacti.
Other houses, happily, we can visit. We ascend a steep flank of the San Jacinto range to get a look at the Frey II house, designed by Swissborn desert modernist Albert Frey. The house is a play on the borders between living and landscape. A giant boulder is incorporated into the interior serving as frontier between bedroom and living area.
“Palm Springs was never a culinary destination until
this year.” JADE NELSON, MANAGER
OF THE ORBIT INN
The current owner of the Edris house has opened the doors to another mid-century modern gem: The stone and glass Edris house built in 1953 by E. Stewart Williams atop a hill of cascading rocks.
You can even live in some of these storied houses. The Twin Palms house where Frank Sinatra’s guests threw eacho ther in the grand-pianoshaped pool — and where Ol’ Blue Eyes and Ava Gardner sometimes threw martinis at each other — can be rented. The house was designed in 1957 by Williams but, unsurprisingly, the Chairman of the Board oversaw a lot of the design details.
Imbar gives a short lecture on how Palm Springs’ modernist legacy, which by the 1980s had become laughably suburban and left in a state of disrepair, became hip again.
“As Will, from Will & Grace would say, the “A-gays” (afflu- ent gays) discovered it. People from San Francisco came and saw all this great architecture and bought it for a song.”
Frey’s most famous Palm Springs design, the soaring wedge-shaped Tramway Gas Station, was almost torn down in the 1990s. Today, fittingly, it houses the Palm Springs Visitors Center. And old motels and motor inns with names like Travel Lodge are being revamped and rebaptized with boutiquey names like “The Curve” and made to look like they were back then, with only a touch of irony thrown in.
When you need a rest from all the design, take the aerial tram to the 8,500 foot top of the San Jacinto range. There is incredible hiking in the Indian Canyon, and the Tahquitz Canyon, ancient home of the Agua Caliente Cajuilla Indians, is just outside the city limits. The famed hot springs are also starting to attract a hip, new, pre-geriatric crowd.
And while Palm Springs is committed to its modernismera tourism, there are signs that they are branching out. I was witness to (and happily participated in) a nascent food scene in Palm Springs, where old-school specialties like Steak Diane and shrimp cocktail used to be among the few restaurant menu options.
“Palm Springs was never a culinary destination until this year,” Jade Nelson the manager of the Orbit Inn tells me. “It should be. People come for everything else: the weather, the architecture, the hiking, the golf, and there are great restaurants opening, now.” Driving the new restaurant trend are restaurants like Cheeky’s, Workshop and Johannes’, where creative chefs are doing desert-to-table “New American” menus using star ingredients from the Coachella Valley.
There’s also a growing indie art and music scene from the neighbouring Coachella Valley desert, including, of course, the pre-eminent Coachella Valley music festival. Still, returning to my hotel at the end of any outing, I can’t help but smile knowing that there’s an Orbitini waiting for me at the boomerang bar — and someone wanting to do the Mashed Potato around the pool.