With the onset of winter, Angelenos follow the red-hot sun east to oases near (Palm Springs). An “ab-fab” hotel in the middle of nowhere? A high-brow “happening” in PS?! Herein, our insiders’ guide to all that’s haute in the desert, 2014! PALM SPRINGS ETERNAL In the Coachella Valley, everything old is new again this fall.
All the Mi-rage! The Kelly Wearstler-designed Viceroy Hotel in downtown Palm Springs is a prime base for exploring the city’s influx of hip new galleries, restaurants, and shops. Palm Springs, having just celebrated her 75th birthday last year, is doing what every lady of a certain age wishes she could: age in reverse. And how. In the span of a decade, says J.R. Roberts, a planning commissioner for the city and the managing director of the Architecture & Design Center of the Palm Springs Art Museum, the visitor population has exploded from design cognoscenti and Hollywood escapees to a perennial crowd of cool-seekers. “We went from a retirement village to a young, hip place,” he laughs.
You might attribute this wave to the maturing of the city’s artistic trifecta: the Palm Springs International Film Festival each January; Modernism Week in February, with its 10 nights of cocktail parties, lectures, and home tours of the city’s mid-century treasures; and Coachella, that surge of music and celebrity that descends on the valley each April. Add to that the Dinah Shore and White Party weekends and the Tachevah Block Party, and hotels took in a quarter more in occupancy tax this year than in 2013.
And where the old Hollywood guard had their hideaway homes in the Old Las Palmas neighborhood, their replacements are snapping up legacy homes. Since Leonardo DiCaprio bought the former Dinah Shore estate for $5.2 million earlier this year (confirmed) and Anne Hathaway went shopping in the same neighborhood (rumored), things are getting a bit buzzier—and pricier.
Palm Springs’ Bootlegger Tiki, an offshoot of Ernest Coffee, will specialize in rum drinks à la Don’s Beachcomber opened now Palm Springs’ Design District. This new verve is all coming as the city does some major nipping and tucking. The Uptown Design District has long attracted fans for its postwar modern and Hollywood Regency vintage furniture. But next year’s addition of the Arrive hotel, a 32-room modular lodging and restaurant planned by Ezra Callahan—Facebook’s sixth employee and a Palm Springs investor—is mobilizing designers, store owners, and gallerists north.
This fall, openings included Triada, the formerly Alan Ladd-owned Spanish Inn, now part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection (640 N. Indian Canyon Dr.,760-844-7000); and Palm Springs Hotel, replacing the Palm Grove and promising ModShop by Room Service furnishings and thoroughly modern perks like Apple TV (2135 N. Palm Canyon Dr., 760-459-1255).
Jaime Kowal, who owns Ernest Coffee in Uptown (1101 N. Palm Canyon Dr., 760-668-1766), is part of a contingent of bright young things renovating and opening places all over town (including her partner, Arrive architect Chris Pardo). “Palm Springs is that balance between new and wonderful throwback,” she says. When Modernism Week held its Fall Season Kick-Off in mid-October, she reignited the crossed tiki torches that mark their just-opened Bootlegger Tiki, the revival of the iconic Don’s Beachcomber Café, which operated here from 1953 until its fame was extinguished in the 1980s (1101 N. Palm Canyon Dr., 760-668-1766).
A mid-century modern building that formerly housed Santa Fe Savings & Loan is now the new Edwards Harris Pavilion, part of the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center.
Offsetting all the uptown hullabaloo, the Palm Springs Art Museum has celebrated the long-awaited opening of the Edwards Harris Pavilion (300 S. Palm Canyon Dr., 760-322-4897), an architecture and design center in a 1950s bank building coincidentally designed by the museum’s own architect, E. Stewart Williams—a development that is quickly invigorating the south end of town. The museum on its own is huge —28 galleries with some 55,000 pieces, including Picasso’s Owl sculpture. It opened with an E. Stewart Williams retrospective on November 9, Roberts says, “We’ll never have a permanent exhibit and we’ll loosely define ‘design.’” (Think an A+D lecture series with topics spanning from Renzo Piano to Trina Turk).
The downtown area is also abuzz as the city renovates a 14-acre plot of land to create a pedestrian-friendly urban village (“Downtown PS”)—complete with a 150-room, four-star Kimpton hotel—breaking ground this month for a 2015 opening. Crowds turn out for the weekly VillageFest on Palm Canyon Drive, a farmers market, flea market, and street fair rolled into one. But frenetic (for Palm Springs) renovation isn’t deterring its steady influx of vacationers. Beautiful young things are still lounging around the pool at the Kelly Wearstler–designed Viceroy (415 S. Belardo Road, 800-237-3687), sipping the hotel’s 1940s throwback cocktails (try the jalapeño-licked Sweet Heat), and dining at the new “Cal-Italian” Appetito Deli in South Palm Springs by Danny Meyer alum Patrick Service (1700 S. Camino Real, 760-327-1929).
Just off East Palm Canyon Drive, the newly opened, 20-room, modern-rustic ranch Sparrows Lodge (1330 E. Palm Canyon Dr., 760-327-2300)—think of it as summer camp for cool kids—is serving cocktails in its retrofitted barn (check in and soak in one of the tubs crafted from horse troughs). From north to south, says Roberts, “We’re a lab for everything cool and artistic now. We’re becoming the arts and cultural center that we were always meant to be.”