MODERNISM WEEK — THE LINEAR FIELD GUIDE
Desert modernism, at the foot of the San Jacintos — briefly in focus
Modernism Week transforms Palm Springs every February. For ten days, the desert becomes an architecture symposium — home tours, screenings, and special events.
This is not a comprehensive Palm Springs guide. It’s a LINEAR Field Guide to Modernism Week — a curated view of where to stay, eat, drink, and see when the city is at its most architecturally alive.
Use this guide as a reference, not a checklist. Use it to orient yourself between tours, to choose where to spend time, and to extend the conversation beyond the official program.
STAY — EAT — DRINK — SEE — PLAN YOUR TRIP
Found your stay below? LINEAR Concierge can help with the booking — offering preferred access and thoughtful perks at our hand-picked stays, for Modernism Week and beyond. Get started with Concierge →
STAY
ARRIVE Palm Springs
The 42-foot pool anchors everything — cabanas, fire pits, bocce and ping pong, restaurant, and bar pressed to its edge. Thirty-two rooms across nine corten-framed buildings orbit this center, butterfly roofs lifting toward mountains, clerestory windows flooding interiors with light.
What makes it LINEAR
Chris Pardo went beyond rooms, designing the hotel itself as social infrastructure. The pool isn’t an amenity, it’s the organizing principle. Rooms orbit it, the restaurant opens to it — communal space is prioritized over isolation. Corten steel and butterfly roofs find the balance between the midcentury and contemporary, resulting in a stay that feels perfectly at home in modern day Palm Springs.
Thompson Palm Springs
Palm Springs’ most anticipated opening claims the perfect intersection — downtown energy meets mountain backdrop. SMS Architects and B2 Design Co designed rooms that breathe comfortable restraint, with a pool framing rugged San Jacinto peaks above Palm Canyon Drive. HALL Napa Valley Tasting Room occupies prime real estate — a welcome counterpoint to the glut of California-casual concepts. The Thompson is the kind of place that understands location more than decoration.
Parker Palm Springs
California’s first Holiday Inn (1959) transformed behind a 23-foot breeze block wall — the white pattern and orange doors now Palm Springs’ most photographed entrance. Jonathan Adler’s 2017 refresh: bronze banana sculptures, graphic textiles, vintage finds across 144 rooms, Judy Kameon gardens, poolside statements.
What makes it LINEAR
Where most desert properties favor restraint, the Parker commits to joy. Six distinct dining and drinking venues mean leaving becomes optional. Hollywood glamour dialed to eleven — a seven-foot bronze banana, a vintage “Drugs” pharmacy sign, technicolor escapism earned through conviction.
L’Horizon Resort
William F. Cody’s 1952 design spread 25 bungalows across three manicured acres. Celebrity refuge then, reinvigorated by Steve Hermann in 2015 — the pool anchors against San Jacinto backdrop, the 26-foot walnut communal table and fire pits draw intimacy, Frette linens and Le Labo amenities dress midcentury bones.
What makes it LINEAR
Discretion through design. Clean lines, flat roofs, private bungalows with personalized door plaques — the kind of seclusion Marilyn Monroe sought. Hermann’s contemporary touch respects Cody’s original intention: refuge from the public eye.
Kimpton Rowan Palm Springs
Palm Springs’ only vertical gesture — seven stories in a land of horizontal sprawl. Chris Pardo’s design cuts angular lines and pop-out boxes across the skyline, expansive glass frames 270-degree views of San Jacinto peaks and the grid below. The rooftop pool and 4 Saints bar claim the elevated perspective.
EAT
Workshop Kitchen
The 1926 El Paseo building’s 27-foot ceiling soars above Michel Abboud’s poured concrete intervention — monolithic booths line walls, a 35-foot communal table anchors center. What was the desert’s first theater now frames Chef Michael Beckman’s kitchen, four consecutive years of Michelin Guide placement well-earned.
What makes it LINEAR
SOMA Architects took a 1926 shell and inserted raw concrete like a piece of contemporary sculpture — preservation through juxtaposition rather than restoration. The béton brut doesn’t apologize for being raw, and Beckman’s cooking shows the same refusal to soften.
Melvyn’s
Slide into the same corner booth where Frank Sinatra sat: Table 13. The Ingleside Estate’s Spanish Colonial bones glow under chandeliers while tuxedoed servers deliver tableside Steak Diane wheeled out on a cart. The kind of Old Hollywood dinner theater that never apologized for the show.
Sandfish
Sushi in the desert reads wrong until you taste it, then it reads inevitable. Scandinavian minimalism meets Engin Onural’s global palate — rustic wood and polished concrete frame sushi under moody lighting. The Uptown Design District spot hums with quiet intention, omakase unfolding at the bar, whiskey pairings challenging what you thought was possible to taste in the desert.
What makes it LINEAR
The juxtaposition isn’t a gimmick — Onural’s precision sushi and whiskey pairings work here because the crowd understands quality transcends geography. Low lighting, intimate scale, and a menu that draws from world travels while respecting Japanese technique. Precision on the plate. Restraint in the room.
The Colony Club
When the film studios instituted the “two-hour rule” requiring actors to stay within reach of LA, Palm Springs became the refuge — Colony Palms (then Colonial House in the 1930s) became the destination. Steve Hermann’s redesign honors that discretion —Art Deco interiors, poolside dining, and Golden Era fine dining through contemporary farm-to-table execution.
What makes it LINEAR
Old Hollywood glamour reimagined, not replicated. Where Parker goes playful, Colony goes refined — more Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc than midcentury hotel. Moroccan-style elegance in the desert, complete with the stories. Clark Gable dined here. So can you.
DRINK
Beaton’s at Bar Cecil
Step into a world of red, where the walls, ceiling, and velvet banquettes are bathed in the hue Bar Cecil is known for. Beaton’s solves the long wait for Bar Cecil reservations by delivering cocktails and bites in a jewel box salon — crowd control at its best. Powder-blue wingbacks, leopard-print cushions, the Bar Cecil team understood aperitifs deserve their own stage. The menu’s calibrated for overflow — pre-dinner or standalone — carrying Bar Cecil’s maximalist approach without dilution.
→ 1555 S Palm Canyon Dr. Unit F
Counter Reformation
Twenty seats along an intimate bar beneath Parker Palm Springs’ glowing palms. A low, pressed tin ceiling, an Italian confessional tucked in back, and ‘70s soul drifting through. Ledge-lean with a 5oz pour from Portugal, order the caviar & doughnuts, and let the elements work their spell.
What makes it LINEAR
Speakeasy intimacy without affectation. No reservations, no tables — just wine, European tabac aesthetic, and Parker’s maximalism distilled to essentials. Bartenders who care in a space scaled for caring.
4 Saints
Downtown Palm Springs sprawls horizontally — except Kimpton Rowan, which stacks seven stories and puts 4 Saints at the very top. Bars, booth, and terrace are oriented toward sunset over the Palm Springs grid and the San Jacinto peaks, giving the view as much weight as the room itself. Michelin Guide-recommended cocktails add substance to the already-elevated affair.
Tailor Shop
Slip through the discreet entrance into vintage-inspired intimacy — dim lighting, craft cocktails stamped with sewing machine ice cubes, bartenders who measure and adjust like they’re fitting a suit. Original cocktails arrive precisely calibrated, with small plates punctuating the conversation.
What makes it LINEAR: Where craft is literal. The tailoring metaphor extends beyond aesthetic — each cocktail measured, deliberate. No outdoor tables announcing location. The kind of place you find, not stumble upon.
SEE
Kaufmann House
Richard Neutra’s 1946 desert modernism founding document. Kaufmann’s vision intersecting Neutra’s architectural precision in a cruciform steel frame, floor-to-ceiling glass, Utah stone anchoring the house to the desert floor. Immortalized in Slim Aarons’s 1970 Poolside Gossip — proof that the house aged into its purpose rather than out of it. A Class 1 Historic Site, best experienced from the street, where the essence still registers.
What makes it LINEAR
A formal solution to constraint. The gloriette rooftop sidesteps Palm Springs’ two-story zoning through pure form, with materials honest about their properties and space flowing without hierarchy. A client-architect collaboration where intention clearly precedes execution — still the standard eight decades later.
The Quantum Astronaut by Julian Voss-Andreae
Walk around it — the astronaut dissolves, reappears, vanishes again. Julian Voss-Andreae’s steel slices catch light like particles, the physicist-turned-sculptor translating wave functions into something you can circle, contemplate, photograph from every angle.
What makes it LINEAR: Where science becomes sculpture. Time functions as material here — cold steel resolving briefly into human form before disappearing again. Contemplation, made kinetic.
Tahquitz Canyon Loop
Two miles through boulder-strewn Agua Caliente land where ancient irrigation channels still trace the canyon walls. Steep rocky steps, minimal shade, then the reward: a gushing waterfall (seasonal, flowing October–May) cascading into clear water.
What makes it LINEAR: Desert architecture you hike through. Stone, water, shadow, light — the raw elements modernism borrows and abstracts in the valley below.
PLAN YOUR TRIP
LINEAR Concierge offers booking support for the stays featured here and beyond — securing preferred access and thoughtful perks at our hand-picked, design-forward properties.
It’s best suited for trips where timing, availability, or place matters, like Palm Springs during Modernism Week. Our goal is simple: to help you see a place at its best.
If you’d like help planning or booking your stay, you can start a Concierge request below. To learn more, email concierge@linear-magazine.com.
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