Palm Springs: An oasis of style

"Carport, breezeway, house. Carport, breezeway, house."

By that point, 90 minutes into our three-hour tour, I'd heard the phrase so many times that my brain was turning it into a sing-song-y lyric, not unlike the one that sets up camp in your cortex following a trip through "It's a Small World" at Disneyland. Except this tune made complete sense.

We were driving through Twin Palms, a neighborhood of 1950s-era tract houses in such uniformly pristine condition that every street looked like a "Brady Bunch" backlot. At each address, tour guide Robert Imber would recite the mantra.

His point? To demonstrate that while each home appeared strikingly different -- thanks to playful variations in rooflines, window placements and ornamental concrete block or stone -- they all followed an identical pattern, that of a carport attached to a breezeway attached to a house. Turns out the houses were all built by the Alexander Brothers, a local developer that found a way to bring the area's iconic modernist design to the masses, a bricks-and-mortar legacy of the United States' cocky postwar confidence.

Although I'd been to Palm Springs, Calif., several times, I never really saw past its obvious attributes: the snow-capped San Jacinto mountains, the eternal sunshine, the desert's flat color palette, punctuated by stretches of grass and gardens. But the rest of the landscape seemed a carbon copy of Southern California's freeway culture: endless strip malls and anonymous gated communities. Yawn.

It took Imber and his three-hour tour to open my eyes to the area's treasure trove of postwar architecture. Despite his minivan's packed-like-anchovies quarters -- and its on-again, off-again air conditioning -- I have never enjoyed a tour as much. Six of us sat, enraptured, as Imber turned the city's streets into a maze and talked, literally nonstop. A good driver? No. An encyclopedic and entertaining advocate for architectural preservation? Absolutely.

L.A. makes its mark

But it was the houses, more than I could possibly count, that made an indelible impression. In the 1950s and 1960s, Palm Springs boomed as an L.A. weekend getaway, leaving hundreds of exquisite modernist temples in its wake. A recent revival in all things mid-century has brought whole neighborhoods back to life, and the visual impact is remarkable.

That stunner just up the street from our rental? Turns out it's Frank Sinatra's home, a Prairie-meets-the-desert ring-a-ding-dinger. Architect Richard Neutra's exquisite glass-and-stone Kaufmann House (the winter home of the family that commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Fallingwater), the hulking concrete turtle-shaped house (owned by Bob Hope and featured in "Diamonds Are Forever"), the sleek "steel" houses, designed by University of Minnesota graduate Donald Wexler? My partner and I might have eventually found them using a map, but without Imber's bottomless well of knowledge we would never have been able to put those Atomic Age beauties into context.

Modernism celebrated

At one point during one of Imber's particularly fascinating dissertations, I thought, this guy ought to make a movie. Turns out, he did. It's called "Desert Utopia," and it's an absorbing documentary devoted to Palm Springs' place-making architects and their work.

The movie had its premiere a few years ago during Modernism Week, an annual celebration of Palm Springs' mid-century design traditions. We happened to be in Palm Springs and somehow landed tickets to the premiere, one of many memorable Moderism Week events we've attended. One year we spent an atypically cloudy afternoon inside the Palm Springs Convention Center, browsing our way through a top-of-the-line array of 1950s and 1960s furniture, art and clothing, and last winter we traded valuable poolside time for a few hours at the Palm Springs Art Museum (another mid-century palace, this time done up in Brutalist concrete and red desert rock).

Sometimes when I tell people that we're spending another February week in the desert, I get a look. Palm Springs? Isn't it just golf, SPF-30 and cocktails? It can be, and we enjoy our share of those vacation pursuits (well, maybe not the golf). But for mid-century design enthusiasts, Palm Springs is like nowhere else. Thanks, Mr. Imber, for showing us the way.