The Palm Springs Boutique Hotels That Put Desert Design on the Map

During Hollywood’s golden age, studio bosses imposed a famous rule on their stars: go anywhere you like on your days off, so long as it is within 100 miles of Los Angeles. This rule helped turn Palm Springs into a desert escape for a generation of actors, directors and producers in search of sun and seclusion. By the late 1940s, the city had become synonymous with poolside glamour, drawing figures such as Frank Sinatra—who was known as "Chairman of the Desert"—Elvis, and Elizabeth Taylor, alongside artists, designers, and cultural figures.

The architects who followed the stars to the desert—the likes of Richard Neutra, Hugh Kaptor, Albert Frey, William F. Cody, and Herbert W. Burns—responded to the desert landscape with a distinctly local approach to modernism. "Palm Springs in the midcentury period was essentially a laboratory," says Steven Keylon, a local architectural historian.

"Because people were building vacation homes, they felt free to experiment with modernism in ways they might never have risked back home. The harsh sun, heat, and wind pushed these architects further still, and the result was a concentration of serious modern architecture in a small desert town that you simply don’t find anywhere else."

Today, many of Palm Springs’ boutique hotels carry on that architectural legacy. The properties below, all members of Palm Springs Preferred Small Hotels, span nearly a century of the city’s history, from a 1920s adobe hacienda to a 1960s modernist compound rumored to have hosted some very high-profile trysts.

1. Casa Cody

The oldest operating hotel in Palm Springs was founded in the 1920s by Harriet Cody, cousin of Buffalo Bill, and quickly became popular with Hollywood guests. Today, following a considered restoration by Casetta Group, the property features a collection of cottages with interiors by Electric Bowery, set across more than 1.5 acres of bougainvillea-fringed grounds dotted with multiple small pools. Several historically significant buildings remain, including an adobe dating to the early 1900s and a cottage that once housed athletes during the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.

"There’s a sense of enclosure and calm at Casa Cody that’s increasingly rare," says Keylon. "Sequestered inside its walls, you can get a real feeling for what Old Palm Springs must have been like."