Our new Tablet Spy program offers the chance to get early looks at the most promising new hotels. If you’re willing to take the risks associated with staying in a hotel that’s not officially open yet — unfinished spaces, noisy construction, inexperienced service — then you’ll be rewarded with deep pre-opening discounts, and the chance to help decide whether the finished hotel will earn a place on Tablet Hotels.
The Ace Hotel group is not content merely to deeply undercut Seattle boutique-hotel prices, or to massively multiply the cool quotient of the Portland budget-hotel market. Now they’re moving beyond the Northwest, straight to what seems like a fairly unlikely locale: the California high desert of Palm Springs.
Then again, this is a brand that’s got a proven track record of being ahead of its time. And Palm Springs makes more sense than you think. Sure, a decade ago this town was fighting the perception that neither it nor its clientele had really moved on from its mid-century heyday — but these days Palm Springs is once again a viable weekender for LA’s young and stylish. This one happens to touch another one of our hot buttons: it’s a refurbishment of a classic and slightly kitsch roadside motel, complete with a restaurant that used to be a Denny’s 24-hour diner.
The rooms are stylish, if not exactly luxurious, offering excellent value and extracting maximum vintage-chic from their humble materials. There’s a central courtyard pool, naturally, and a spa that, in its casual unpretentiousness, makes a mockery of the typical “pampering” hotel-spa experience. Add a well-conceived and effortlessly hip hotel bar, and the Ace vaults to the front line of the Palm Springs renaissance.
How to get there:
From Palm Springs International. Airport, 3.5 miles - approximately 10 mins.
Please contact customerservice@tablethotels.com to arrange airport transfers.
author watson@mouselink.net, source www.tablethotels.com
