Thanksgiving at La Quinta

The Property

Some history, since this is the whole reason to go.

In 1921, a San Francisco socialite named Walter H. Morgan — heir to the Morgan Oyster Company fortune — came to the Coachella Valley for his health. He stayed for the desert. He bought 1,400 acres of empty sand at the foot of the Santa Rosa Mountains, twenty-two miles from Palm Springs, and decided to build a small, secluded retreat — an idea that struck most of his contemporaries as faintly ridiculous: luxury, in the desert.

In 1925, Morgan hired the Pasadena architect Gordon Kaufmann to translate the idea into reality. What emerged was not a grand hotel but something quieter — twenty adobe casitas arranged around tiled courtyards, white stuccoed walls, hand-set red roof tiles, blue shutters. The bricks were fired in a kiln on the property. Each casita was named for a saint. The doors opened on December 29, 1926.

Word reached Hollywood almost immediately. The studio system held its biggest stars to a "two-hour rule" — they were not to vacation any farther from the soundstage than that — and La Quinta sat exactly at the edge of the radius. Greta Garbo came. So did Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Shirley Temple, the DuPonts, the Vanderbilts. Frank Capra wrote screenplays in casita San Anselmo, including It Happened One Night; eventually he stopped going home and just lived there. Eisenhower played the golf course. Ginger Rogers married Jacques Bergerac at the courtyard fountain in 1953.

When the surrounding community incorporated as a city in 1982, it took its name from the resort. La Quinta is one of only two cities in California named after a hotel. The other is Beverly Hills.

A property-wide restoration finished in time for the 100th anniversary. The bones are unchanged — the same red-tile roofs, the same arcaded walkways, the same fountain Ginger Rogers got married in front of. The historic core where we'll be staying is the original 1926 footprint.

This is not the kind of place you go for noise. It's the kind of place you go to read a book on a patio under a citrus tree, walk fifty feet to a small private pool shared by sixteen rooms, and have a quiet drink before dinner. We've booked two of the original casitas. They sit ten paces from one of the smaller courtyard pools.

The Shape of the Days

Loose, but with a few non-negotiables.