The Saguaro Palm Springs

A 1977 Holiday Inn, Repainted Into a Landmark

In 2012, developer Sydell Group gut-renovated a dated three-story Holiday Inn dating to 1977, working with New York architects Stamberg Aferiat on a fast, roughly fourteen-week makeover built almost entirely around paint rather than structural change. The team first coated the building in white, then applied a fourteen-color palette drawn from Coachella Valley desert wildflowers, arranged as a gradient across the balconies so that the longest façade alone carries dozens of distinct color pairings. Palm Springs' Architectural Advisory Committee initially balked at the scheme before the Planning Commission approved it unanimously in late 2011, and the result reopened as The Saguaro the following year. A sister property later opened in Scottsdale, Arizona, using a related design language, though the Palm Springs original remains the reference point for the concept.

Why It Works

We chose The Saguaro for a renovation that solved its main problem, an aging, forgettable hotel shell, without tearing anything down. The color work turns a routine mid-century building into something closer to a piece of applied art, and the pool-fence mural, an abstracted mountainscape nodding to Palm Springs modernists like Albert Frey and Richard Neutra, extends the same idea into the courtyard. It is a hotel that commits fully to one bold idea rather than spreading a design budget thin across many small gestures, and that clarity is what still reads, more than a decade on, as a deliberate choice rather than a dated trend.

Why This Location

The hotel sits on East Palm Canyon Drive in south Palm Springs, in the Smoke Tree area, a roughly ten-minute drive rather than a walk from the restaurants and galleries of downtown; a free shuttle covers the distance for guests without a car. The setting trades downtown's walkability for a quieter stretch of the valley, with mountain views that frame the property's own color scheme rather than competing with it.

Fast Facts

• Price: Premium

• Vibe: Pop-art color, social, pool-centered

• Rooms: Pool View, Mountain View, Poolside Patio, and the top-floor Saguaro Suite with two full baths and a soaking tub

• Best For: travelers who want a hotel that doubles as a design statement and don't mind trading downtown walkability for a shuttle ride

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: the fourteen-color balcony gradient, planned as a single continuous palette rather than a repeating pattern

• Dining: El Jefe Desert Cantina, for tacos, fresh-fruit margaritas, and a weekend drag brunch

• Amenities: central courtyard pool with two hot tubs and a swim-up bar, full-service spa, 24-hour gym, weekend yoga, bocce court, cruiser bikes

• Attractions: south Palm Springs' Smoke Tree neighborhood, with downtown Palm Springs a short shuttle ride away

Fourteen Colors, One Desert Palette

The palette itself is the hotel's real design statement: fourteen hues pulled from Coachella Valley wildflowers, mixed and matched across balcony panels so that no two sightlines repeat the same combination. It is a maximalist answer to the beige-and-glass restraint that defines much of Palm Springs' hotel scene, achieved with paint rather than a structural rebuild, a detail that matters as much to the hotel's identity as any amenity list, and one that has made the property a recognizable reference point in the city's design conversation.

Pool Days and Late Nights

The central courtyard pool, framed by the mural and ringed by cabanas and daybeds, is where the hotel's social energy concentrates during the day, with a swim-up bar keeping the scene going through the afternoon. El Jefe Desert Cantina carries that same mood after dark, with a speakeasy-style late bar and a weekend drag brunch that has become one of the property's signatures, a reminder that The Saguaro is built around gathering rather than seclusion. The energy peaks on weekends, when the pool deck and the cantina effectively merge into one continuous scene, a pattern that suits travelers looking for company as much as a place to sleep.