From the archive: This story originally published in The Desert Sun in October 2014.
Stroll down one path and come upon an English croquet lawn. Wander in the other direction and you have just stepped onto a boules court in the Bois de Boulogne.
Ten years ago this month, the Parker Palm Springs opened its iconic orange doors to the public, revealing a fresh, luxurious-yet-tongue-in-cheek interior renovation and garden landscape straight out of “Alice in Wonderland.”
The transformation of the Merv Griffin’s Resort and Givenchy Spa property in Palm Springs — an old grand dame that stood as a striking symbol of the resort community’s fading glory — telegraphed that a renaissance was afoot for the once-vibrant playground that prided itself on a celebrity-soaked history.
The Parker Palm Springs marks its 10-year anniversary this month. And in that time, the hotel — elegantly and demurely hidden behind high walls and hedges — has become synonymous with celebrity names like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, or Robert Downey Jr., as well as the well-heeled and style conscious guests who seem a natural fit with the comfy and casual Jonathan Adler interiors.
It would set the precedent for those who would follow: Newcomers like the Ace Hotel and Swim Club and the Saguaro would burst onto the scene. The Viceroy and the Riviera Resort and Spa would undergo stylish makeovers. Dozens of small boutique hotels, many with a fresh take on retro, would pop up, capitalizing on the sudden influx of young tourists — the most the valley had seen since the days when Palm Springs was a spring break mecca.
During that time, the Parker solidified its place as the resort of choice for the cognoscenti and the celebrity set, who year after year let their hair down behind the famous white walls.
Devil is in the details
“One of the reasons that couples love to get married at the Parker is because they have the sense that it’s sort of their own estate. And that really was part of our whole thinking,” said Steven Pipes, president of the Jack Parker Corp., the New York hotel company that owns the Parker. “Really, this is as if you’ve come to your eccentric great aunt’s estate, and she’s taking care of things for you.”
It’s all enough to evoke “a slightly hippie feeling, though you know it’s very upscale. To me, it was brilliant,” said Mary Jo Ginther, director of tourism for the Palm Springs Bureau of Tourism. “And they support the building that it’s in. That building done wrong could look like a bad motel.”
The attention to detail extends to the sprawling grounds, which are dotted with delights that keep guests exploring.
“The meandering paths with dense bordering plantings makes for a fun experience walking through the gardens. Almost like a jungle experience,” recent guest Guy Acheson of Sacramento said in an email. Some of the details were too provocative for him, though, including the vintage drug pharmacy sign that blares “drugs” in the main lobby.
Turning the tide in Palm Springs
Local hotel-industry professionals say the Parker — with a history that includes celebrity owners Gene Autry and Merv Griffin — was the first of a wave of hotel renovations and re-brandings that has moved through Palm Springs in the last decade.
And indeed, the property that is now the Parker hotel opened as California’s first Holiday Inn in 1959. Gene Autry purchased the property in 1961 to house his baseball team, the California Angels during spring training. The site was dubbed Melody Ranch.
In 1994, Autry sold the property to hotel director Rose Narva, who turned the site into a French-themed resort in line with designer Hubert de Givenchy and renamed it the Givenchy Hotel and Spa. Merv Griffin would step in and buy the hotel in 1998, adding his name to the sign and attracting some of the biggest-name celebrities of the day. In 2003, Jack Parker purchased the old Merv Griffin Resort and Givenchy Spa site and hired designer Jonathan Adler for a $27 million remodel.
The evolution served as a template for other sites in Palm Springs and across the valley.
The Ace Hotel and Swim Club used to be a Howard Johnson, while The Saguaro Palm Springs was formerly a Holiday Inn. Other hotels from the Hilton to the Renaissance to the Viceroy have undergone significant and multimillion-dollar upgrades in the last few years.
“The Parker renovation definitely demonstrated how to make an older property relevant, hip and fun, and it still feels that way, 10 years later,” said Trina Turk, the Palm Springs fashion designer whose line has come to define a reinvigorated look of desert and Southern California casual.
“I’d like to think that both Trina Turk and the Parker helped to usher along the evolution,” Turk offered in an email. “With a fresh take on the swanky heyday of desert style, there is a synergy between us that has drawn attention back to Palm Springs.”
Turk’s boutique, which opened in 2002, was one of the first in a new wave of Palm Canyon Drive stores in what is now called the Uptown Design District in Palm Springs. Since then, the once-sleepy strip has nurtured smart shops and popular restaurants. Turk has gone on to expand her empire and open a dozen other boutiques in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Hoteliers who have been around for at least the last decade say they’ve seen the transition, too.
“This property was the start of other developers like Ace, Viceroy, Colony Palms, Saguaro and Hard Rock Hotel Palm Springs who decided to enter the market and capture the same segment of the business,” said Aftab Dada, general manager for the Hilton Palm Springs and chair of the hotel nonprofit PS Resorts. Dada is one of the few hotel general managers in Palm Springs who was also a general manager 10 years ago. Dada notes that the Parker’s revenue per available room — a key metric analysts look at when evaluating the health of the local tourism economy — is consistently the highest in the valley.
“The conversion of the Parker hotel from the former Givenchy was the key turning point in attracting back the celebrities from the Hollywood community,” Dada said.
The Jack Parker Corp., which also operates Le Parker Meridien in mid-town Manhattan in New York City, invested some $27 million into the creation of the Parker, which entailed a radical transformation from the very formal Givenchy hotel — with its acres of rose bushes and formal gardens — to a landscape that is essentially a series of outdoor rooms surrounded by the hotel’s guestroom buildings and villas.
“Parker, to me, was really forging new ground,” remarked Ginther. “Just creating an environment and an experience, taking that building — and you’d have to look across that whole courtyard, after the rose bushes have come out — and see it all open and plain, and understand what they’ve done that’s created these experiences.”
After acquiring the property, the Jack Parker Corp. spent nearly a year to figure out what direction to take with the property.
“We felt that the bones of the property were fabulous, although we thought that it had been done in a style that we thought was completely out of character,” Pipes reflected. “And so we bought it, not entirely certain for what the design was going to look like or how we were going to do it, but knowing that we wanted to create a brand of resort that was both high-end, but very comfortable, and completely lacking in any pretension, and was not about gold-plated faucets, but really about the outdoor experience, the grounds, food and beverage, and just making it a sort of one-stop-shop so that when you were there you didn’t even need to leave the property if you came for two or three or four nights. Which is something that we have very much found to be the case.”
Reflecting on the past; an eye to the future
The past 10 years have seen the rise of an overall improved stock of hotel properties in Palm Springs and across the valley, as well as the expansion and burnishing of the valley’s signature events, such as the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Modernism Week.
And the Parker is often the only setting celebrities and others in the entertainment industry will consider.
“As chairman of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, I can tell you that the biggest names in Hollywood love to stay at the hotel in large part because of the upscale grounds and public rooms that offer a feeling of privacy for both celebrities and the affluent,” Palm Springs International Film Festival Chairman Harold Matzner said in an email. “The major film studios want all of their stars and executives who are participating in the festival’s Awards Gala to stay exclusively at the Parker.”
The film festival’s awards gala after-party at the Parker is one of the most prized invitations in the valley’s significant party season.
“The fact that the biggest names in the country are comfortable at the Parker, I am sure has encouraged new hoteliers in Palm Springs to pursue a similar demographic,” Matzner added.
The guests who seek out the Parker, Pipes said, are “not so much age-driven, as it is attitude and mind-set driven. Somebody who enjoys life and enjoys the outdoors, the great weather of California, and Palm Springs in particular. And it’s become a place where, yes, there are celebrities who come there, but they can hang around and not be harassed by people.”
Back in 2003 when the Jack Parker Corp. bought the Givenchy, the move came as a surprise to the local hotel industry. It was a gamble that paid off.
“We all thought, really? Because you only have one other hotel in New York,” Ginther recalled. “So think about that. To me, that was a massive step. I mean, you’ve got one hotel in New York, and then, to Palm Springs, which (at that time,) is still kind of viewed as somewhat older. Somewhat retired. Somewhat slow, at the time. And they said, ‘no, we’re going to create this completely different experience here.'”
In the past 50 years, Pipes says there are three names that stand out in the hotel industry: Conrad Hilton; Kemmons Wilson, the founder of Holiday Inn; and Ian Schrager of Public in Chicago, who is largely credited with creating the “boutique hotel” category. “But when you look at the resort world, really no one had done anything. Especially domestically. And if you looked at typical places to go, whether it was in California or in Florida, or even the Caribbean or Hawaii, everything was pretty plain vanilla, big-box, and frankly, boring.
“We’re a relatively small company with the ability to do sort of bigger things,” Pipes said, speaking recently from his office in New York. “And when we sat, you know, 11, 12 years ago we were looking at the market in the hospitality world … and where we really saw a dearth of innovation and places that we wanted to go — were in the resort world.”
Pipes and the Parker team began looking for locations to plan a resort hotel. They wanted a warm climate, and Pipes had lived for a short time in Palm Springs many years ago.
“And I said, ‘I wonder what Palm Springs is like today?’ And so we went back there and we started looking at a number of projects,” he said. “While we were there, we really sort of liked the Palm Springs vibe, more than the down-valley one. We thought it had a lot more authenticity to it.”
It was then that Pipes came across the Givenchy property.
“We still do things all the time, to the property, and we have some plans for some things upcoming that will add more to it,” he said of the 13-acre site.
“And you know, did it come out the way we hoped and has it transformed?” Pipes continued. “It really did come out. And again, from a personal perspective that we love.
“Every time that I’m there, it’s always with difficulty that I leave to go to the airport to come home,” he said. “There’s something very magical about it.”
Pipes said the company has considered the possibility of another hotel acquisition in the eventual future.
“We have looked at a number of things. We haven’t found another Parker Palm Springs,” he said. “When we do, we will do it. We would love to. It’s just the opportunity to find the right product, the right market that we feel good about.
“We have patience,” he continued. “And it has to feel right for us to do it.”
