An Insider’s Guide to a Palm Springs, CA Vacation

Reported by Vogue.

There are desert towns, and then there is Palm Springs — a city that operates on its own atmospheric logic, where the light hits the San Jacinto Mountains at angles that feel practically hallucinatory and the heat somehow makes everything make sense. The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians have called this oasis home for centuries, long before Hollywood descended with its sunglasses and its egos, drawn by the same natural hot springs and fan palms that still anchor the city today. What followed was a particular kind of glamour: Frank Sinatra's Twin Palms estate, Marilyn Monroe between films, Elvis and Priscilla honeymooning in an A-frame minutes from downtown. The mid-century bones — Richard Neutra homes, Albert Frey geometries, the Tramway Gas Station — are still standing, still stunning, still somehow not the whole story.

According to Vogue, Palm Springs is the kind of place that gets its hooks into you and keeps pulling. The city wears its architectural history lightly, pairing it with serious cocktail bars, design-forward hotels, and hikes that border on spiritual. It rewards the obsessive traveler — the one who schedules gallery time before brunch and stays on the architecture walk long after everyone else has bailed.

Where to Sleep, Eat, and Actually Live While You're There

The hotel situation alone could justify the trip. Casa Cody, Palm Springs' oldest operating hotel, is a 30-room Spanish Colonial Revival built in the 1920s — recently renovated by Electric Bowery and Terremoto with Zellige tile, Parachute linens, and Aesop products that make it feel simultaneously historic and current. Korakia Pensione is a Moroccan-inspired compound on 1.5 acres of lantern-lit gardens, originally built by painter Gordon Coutts in the 1920s, with 28 individually named villas that attract artists and aesthetes in equal measure. Sparrows Lodge, once MGM actor Don Castle's 1950s hideaway, now offers horse trough bathtubs and a Ruscha-to-Baldessari art collection alongside farm-sourced dinners under string lights. And The Parker — Jonathan Adler's maximalist, 13-acre pleasure palace built on the bones of California's first Holiday Inn — remains gloriously, unapologetically itself, complete with clay tennis courts, a speakeasy wine bar, and a lobby "Drugs" sign that sets expectations immediately.

On the food side: Boozehounds does the best brunch in town (smoked trout caesar, poke toast, plus a dedicated dog menu in an Art Deco atrium); Townie Bagels earns its line with New York-style rounds in flavors like olive-fennel and bacon-cheddar; and Copley's on Palm Canyon — occupying Cary Grant's former guesthouse — serves crispy branzino with wasabi and chicken-lemongrass potstickers under open sky with the mountains watching. For nightcaps, Seymour's, a speakeasy tucked inside Mr. Lyons, is dim, vintage-portrait-lined, and exactly as good as a bar called Seymour's inside a place called Mr. Lyons should be.

When the pool loses its appeal, Andreas Canyon Trail — a one-mile loop through ancient fan palms once inhabited by Agua Caliente ancestors — offers shade and silence in equal measure, while the family-owned Moorten Botanical Garden, operating since 1938, delivers an acre of otherworldly cacti, crystals, and fossils that is aggressively photogenic and genuinely strange.

Palm Springs is not a place you visit once and consider done — it is a place you return to until you finally understand what the light is trying to tell you.

Read the original at Vogue.