The Top 18 Hotels in Palm Springs
-
A midcentury Palm Springs hotel remade by Jonathan Adler swings between whimsy and glamour, its lobby crowded with armor and groovy carpets, its tangerine doors opening onto a seventy-year pedigree stretching back to Gene Autry. The place traffics in permission—to lounge in hammocks at odd hours, to eat eggs Benedict at three in the afternoon, to treat leisure as the whole point.
-
An 11-room adults-only hotel that trades Palm Springs modernism for the casual glamour of 1960s French Riviera, all sunny colors and bohemian details arranged around a charming pool. No restaurant, but the setting—garden, orchard, restorative light—supplies what the kitchen doesn't.
-
Downtown Palm Springs' Holiday House ditches the usual hierarchy—rooms are simply Good, Better, Best—each appointed with original art and custom textiles by a Hollywood designer who orchestrated the recent restoration. Even the entry tier arrives bright and proportioned, while higher categories add wet bars or mountain-view patios that justify their step up.
-
A 1933 Spanish colonial hotel remade for the boutique era, La Serena Villas preserves its original architectural character while integrating contemporary comforts throughout its rooms and public spaces. The result is a rare instance of restraint in Palm Springs, where vintage charm and present-day design coexist without competing.
-
A Fifties motor lodge reborn for the design-conscious, Sparrows Lodge trades the poolside hustle for horseshoes, campfires, and a red barn that serves dinner after dark. The cocktails are craft, the bathtubs are horse troughs, and the whole enterprise reads as summer camp for adults who've read the right magazines.
-
A modest mid-century refuge with twenty-seven rooms and a playful spirit, Les Cactus sits five minutes from downtown Palm Springs, its pool and fire pit designed for adults who value quiet over spectacle. The price is reasonable for the setting, though dining means a short drive into town.
-
The Royal Sun's tangerine-trimmed facade and angular canopy evoke a scaled-up roadside motel from the sixties, positioned where downtown Palm Springs meets open land. Inside, checkered floors and curved booths frame a sleek bar and restaurant that honors its era without genuflecting to it.
-
A modernist compound in the Uptown Design District that borrows Palm Springs' architectural lineage without genuflecting to nostalgia, this Palisociety venture translates the group's accessible glamour into a fresh idiom. The result feels rooted in place yet untethered to theme—a hotel that moves beyond the city's familiar aesthetic without abandoning it.
-
A mid-century motor lodge stripped of its corporate skin and reborn as something truer to itself, where the roadside vernacular speaks louder than boutique pretense. The motel form—that distinctly American architecture of transience and possibility—finds here its proper dignity.
-
A mid-century motor lodge reborn as a design-conscious refuge where Palm Springs' old-money mystique meets the desert's austere light. The Avalon trades on its provenance—once the Estrella, repository of Hollywood legend—while serving a new generation of Los Angeles escapists who've grown bored with the predictable coast.
-
A Spanish Colonial retreat from 1936 that once sheltered Hollywood's elite now courts a new generation with restored glamour and careful restraint. The Colony Palms trades on its storied past without nostalgia, offering instead the particular comfort of a place that knows exactly what it is.
-
A minimalist industrial boutique tucked one block from Palm Springs' main corridor, where white stucco geometry yields to vibrant murals and Mexican textiles. Native succulents and handmade fabrics soften the geometric lines in a deliberate break from the area's ubiquitous midcentury mode.
-
A French-inspired boutique hotel where black flowers—literal and painted—frame a languorous poolside scene of parasols, fire pits, and mountain views. The speakeasy rosé bar and casitas with terra-cotta floors and midcentury furnishings complete an atmosphere of deliberate, slightly theatrical leisure.
-
A Spanish Revival hotel where Old Hollywood lingers in the courtyards and suites, the Ingleside Inn trades gleaming modernism for the textures of another era. The place wears its Rat Pack inheritance lightly, updated without apology, and feels less like nostalgia than like stepping into a room where the glamour never quite left.
-
Kimpton's desert outpost trades exclusivity for accessible style, channeling the brand's mid-century sensibility into an unpretentious retreat that mirrors Palm Springs' own extroverted ease. The result feels less like entering a velvet rope and more like joining a particularly well-appointed house party.
-
At the edge of Palm Springs, beneath the San Jacinto mountains, Korakia assembles three houses of different eras and geographies—a 1924 Moroccan villa, a Hellenic addition, a Mediterranean compound—into one deliberately mismatched whole. The result feels less like a resort and more like the accumulated taste of someone who collected places the way others collect art.
-
William F. Cody's mid-century masterpiece, once a private haven for Hollywood's A-list, now operates as a hotel under designer Steve Hermann's stewardship with the ease of a place finally living into its purpose. The architecture breathes the languid confidence of Palm Springs' golden era, and the service understands that restraint is luxury.
-
Villa Royale preserves the postwar glamour that once drew Hollywood to its quiet corner of Palm Springs, updated without surrender to contemporary luxury. The restaurant and bar remain the gravitational center of a deliberately discreet, adults-only refuge.