A Design Lover’s Guide to Palm Springs

This 28-room boutique hotel in downtown Palm Springs feels like a hidden oasis, despite its prime real estate. First opened in 1951, it was purchased and revamped in 2016 by Sparrows Lodge creators Jeff Brock and Richard Crisman, who enlisted interior designer Mark D. Sikes to create a communal atmosphere. The vibe is indeed convivial, and when we visited in December, guests traipsed from the pool to the bar, drumming up conversation between refills of rosé.

Holiday House is also full of quiet masterpieces by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Herb Ritts, Alex Katz, and Donald Sultan, whose minimalist sculpture holds court on an outdoor pavilion. Brock and Crisman, owners of a massive collection, divided between Holiday House and Sparrows Lodge, like that it allows guests to interact with the work. “It gives us great pleasure to share the art with others,” said Crisman. “The hope,” he adds, is “to create a space where the guest wants to learn more, not only about the art but also about others that are staying at the hotel with them. The art is often a conduit to start conversations.”

200 W. Arenas Rd., Palm Springs, CA; holidayhouseps.com.

This estate, set on 200 stunning acres, was the preferred winter escape for philanthropists Leonore and Walter Annenberg, who hosted elaborate parties on its grounds. President Ronald Reagan is said to have visited at least 18 times, and Frank Sinatra married his fourth wife in the Annenbergs’ great room. But the house was perhaps above all the ultimate showcase for the couple’s massive impressionist art collection, immaculate facsimiles of which still hang on the walls. (52 of their most prized pieces were donated over the years to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including works from Van Gogh, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, and more.) Still, the estate remains a public destination, thanks to conservation efforts by legendary Los Angeles-based architect A. Quincy Jones, and is home to both incredible sculptures and outdoor spaces. Sunnylands, officially opened to the public in 2012, offers tickets to tour the pink palace—plus its 850 olive trees and nearly a dozen lakes. Plan ahead: tickets can sell out weeks in advance.

37977 Bob Hope Dr., Rancho Mirage, CA; sunnylands.org.

The Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum is a permanent exhibition that the artist himself built just six miles from the heart of downtown Joshua Tree, and a 40-minute drive from the Coachella Valley. Purifoy was best known for his iconic assemblage sculptures; the artist recently celebrated in a posthumous retrospective at LACMA. The museum did its best, but only in the harshness of the desert do the larger-than-life installations truly provoke genuine awe.  

For more art in the wilderness, you can follow updates from Desert X, a biannual international exhibition that invites acclaimed artists to create site-specific artworks all across the barren landscape.

62975 Blair Ln., Joshua Tree, CA; noahpurifoy.com.

There is public art, and then there is what the artist Andrea Zittel proposes: a desert experiment where the public becomes the art. Zittel has accumulated over 50 acres in the California desert near Joshua Tree National Park. There, she conducts “tests” that examine how we use furniture, clothes, food, and space, especially when resources are limited. A-Z West hosts tours on the grounds, but the brave can apply to stay on site in one of Zittel’s “Experimental Living Cabins,” for up to a week.

“I don’t want people to be uncomfortable, but I don’t want them to feel comfortable, either,” Zittel said in a 2017 interview with the New York Times. “You know when you’re alone with yourself, and you feel jangly and on edge? But in a way that’s the most cathartic thing in the world? Almost painful, but so good?”

Various locations; visit highdeserttestsites.com for more info.

Climb the hills that border the Yucca Valley to find this Hopi-influenced pueblo conceptualized by the explorer and innovator Cabot Yerxa. Yerxa, who laid its foundations in 1941 and continued to work on it until his death in 1965, built the structure from a mix of found materials and handmade sun-dried bricks. Since then, Cabot’s Pueblo Museum—all 35 rooms, 150 windows, 65 doors, and 30 unique roof levels of it—has become a local landmark. A tour of the space is well worth it if only to marvel at the Waokiye, a sculpture carved by the artist Peter “Wolf” Toth out of a 750-year-old Sequoia Redwood. It weighs over 20 tons, a monument to Native American struggle in the United States.

67616 Desert View Ave., Desert Hot Springs, CA; cabotsmuseum.org.