Palm Springs, CA

This trip was the 2025 edition of our February escape from PNW winter. It was also a bucket list item to visit mid-century modern mecca during modernism week (20th anniversary!). Home tours, garden tours, commercial architecture, a Josef Albers color workshop, and lots of sun.

The most memorable meals were probably breakfast at Palm Greens Cafe, lunch at Chef Tanya's, and two dinners at Tac/quila and Workshop Kitchen.

A great long Presidents' Day weekend!

The Ocotillo Lodge

Our home base for the trip and a great example of mid-century architecture itself. Built by the Alexanders as a hotel to house prospective buyers in their adjacent Twin Palms development. Later owned by Gene Autry and Jerry Buss it is now a condo complex and class 1 historic site.

Homes

We toured a variety of Palm Springs homes across several of the 54 neighborhoods in town. There are lots of distinctive exterior features, including the butterfly roof, screening block, and carport-breezeway-home building blocks of many homes. Interiors were often colorful, using cool terrazzo floors, floor to ceiling windows or clerestory windows, and distinctive mid-century furniture.

The last picture below shows the home of Frank Sinatra, "Chairman of the Board", before he moved to Rancho Mirage.

Gardens

We also toured several home gardens, showcasing the ubiquitous pools, palms, and lounges. Just over the wall of the home in the last photo is Peter Lawford's home, where JFK is rumored to have met Marilyn Monroe for the first time.

Celebrities

These photos are of two interesting houses, Howard Hughes' hillside home and the home that Elvis Presley rented for a year, including his honeymoon. Note the floor mounted light switches in Hughes' house, installed during his germaphobia period. In addition to Sinatra's home and Lawford's, we cruised by Dina Shore's, Trini Lopez's, and a host of others.

Colors

We participated in a great workshop on color theory and the history of Josef Albers. Led by Fritz Horstman, who recently published a book on Albers' color experiments, we got to play with color for a few hours and try to develop our own optical combinations and visuals.

Giants

The historical society led a walking tour of mid-century commercial buildings that showcased another side of the modernism trend. Often built on a plinth to appear light and often colorful, It's great to see so many of these buildings preserved. The dramatic roof shown in one of the pictures is one of a handful of remaining architect designed original gas stations in town. Franchise 'cookie cutter' stations were not allowed back in the day. The roof shape is called a hyperbolic paraboloid, similar to a saddle.

Nature

The Coachella valley really is pretty in its own way. The mountains are striking and the desert floor is more diverse than one would think. We visited an actual oasis. The San Andreas fault created a crack in the earth's crust that allowed water from the aquifer to surface and kick off the growth of palms and other plants that became hospitable to animals and so on...

Definitely more to see in the Coachella valley. We'll be back!