Flat-roofed stucco blocks arranged around a generous pool deck, with the San Jacinto Mountains rising abruptly behind — the mid-century motel bones of what became the Ace Hotel & Swim Club Palm Springs were already deeply local before Commune Design got involved. The Los Angeles-based studio took over a 1965 Howard Johnson's motor inn in 2009, working with the property's 180 rooms across low-rise two-storey blocks rather than against them, preserving the sprawling horizontal logic that defines Palm Springs at its most characteristic. Cork floors warm the guest rooms, where slatted louvered walls serve as improvisational gallery rails — handwoven textiles, macramé wall hangings, acoustic guitars, and vintage travel trunks arranged with the casual accumulation of a well-traveled friend's apartment rather than any curatorial program. Cowhide rugs and sheer canvas curtains on ceiling-mounted tracks divide space without closing it off, and the grid-stitch cotton bedspreads carry the same unhurried tactility as everything else. Outside, the pool terraces are furnished with wire-frame lounge chairs and wood-framed pergolas that filter the desert light without blocking the mountain view, while the open-air restaurant shelters beneath a canvas canopy strung with café bulbs, its salvaged palm trunks serving as structural columns. The whole property functions less as a hotel than as a kind of permanent desert encampment for the culturally curious.

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