An oasis with no televisions
An old Hollywood hideaway from 1952: a barn, twenty rooms in former stables, and the desert all around.
Sparrows Lodge, Palm Springs, California. Stayed, September 2026.
Why I like it
Sparrows Lodge is an oasis, warm and a little eclectic, and small enough that the people who check you in might also pour your coffee. It feels like staying in the home of a friend with very good taste. There are no televisions and no phones in the rooms, and after a day you stop missing them.
The place
It opened in 1952 as Castle's Red Barn, a getaway run by the MGM actor Don Castle and his wife, Zetta, and one of the first places Hollywood came to escape. The barn is still at the heart of it, and the twenty rooms sit in two long rows of former stables. After a full restoration in 2013 by its owners, Richard Crisman and Jeff Brock, it settled into its own look, closer to modern rustic than the mid-century style Palm Springs is known for: exposed beams, concrete floors set with pebbles, Italian linens, soaking tubs made from horse troughs, and art from the owners' own collection on the walls.
The table
The Barn Kitchen is run by Jon Butler, who cooked at Arzak and noma before coming home to California, and his menu moves with whatever the Coachella Valley growers bring in. Dinner is mostly outdoors under an arbor strung with lights, at tables relaxed enough for strangers to end up sharing a bottle, and private enough if you'd rather not. Breakfast is simple and included, the kind you take slowly by the pool.
The land
The desert does the work here: the mountains turning pink at the end of the day, the dry warmth, the stillness at night. Most rooms open onto a private patio, there's a vegetable garden and a fire pit, and the whole place is built around being outside.
Who it's for
For couples, for a weekend with friends, or for anyone who needs a few days of nothing in particular. It's an easy escape from Los Angeles, and at its best from autumn through spring. It holds a MICHELIN Key, but the better sign is that most of the guests have been before.
The best version of this stay barely leaves the gate.
What it's made of
How a place makes you feel comes through the senses. These are the ones I remember.
- SightThe San Jacinto at duskSunset turning the mountains pink
- SoundThe musicEasy and sunlit by the pool, deeper and slower by the fire at night. No televisions.
- SmellWhite sageBurning on an old millstone in the garden, by the pool
- TasteHalf chicken mole at the Barn KitchenOaxacan mole, pickled onion, sesame, guacamole, warm tortillas
- TouchThe rock wallRaw stone around an open rain shower, pebbles underfoot, a horse trough for a bath
- To take homeA sage bundleTied with a box of matches, given as you leave
- MorningA late breakfast, and a long morning by the pool with a book.
- AfternoonA nap in the heat of the afternoon.
- DuskA walk as the mountains change color.
- EveningDinner under the lights of the arbor, and s'mores at the fire pit.
