Palm Springs

The Hoppy House in the early '60s.

Another thing I really like about The Mod Resort: it’s so close to everything. In fact, since I got here, I haven’t gotten in my car once (and, yes, I actually have left my room—on occasion). Sometimes in the morning, before it gets too warm out, I’ll just stroll aimlessly about the neighborhood. There are a lot of interesting homes out here. For instance, just a block away is Hopalong Cassidy’s old house (officially called the William Boyd House but known to locals as “Hoppy House.”).

Boyd, who always dressed in black and rode a pure white horse named Topper, decided when he built the house in the early ‘50s to stick with the black-and-white color scheme. So just about everything inside and out was either black or white. Wild, huh?

I got to see the house a few years back when the then-owner, a local contractor, had rehabbed the home before putting it up for auction. He’d repainted both the interior and exterior in Hoppy’s trademark black and white colors. There wasn’t much inside in the way of furniture since Hernandez had already cleared out a lot of the memorabilia—like the old saddles that Hoppy had turned into bar stools—for a memorabilia auction in the Bay Area.

Boyd and his wife, Grace, lived in the house until 1971. He died a year later at age 77. And what happened to the house? Well, it was sold at auction to a direct mail executive for $467,000. Stan Fedderly, who bought it, said after the auction, “I’m just a lucky guy. I didn’t think I was going to get it.”

Lucky indeed.

As I mentioned, when I last stayed at Laura Slipak’s The Mod Resort, she made me a martini upon check-in. Actually, she called it a Mod-tini and when I asked her if she did that for all her guests, she shrugged and said, No. “I have to get a vibe about someone. If I like them, I’ll make it.”

Well, she’s not making the Mod-tini anymore. She’s moved on. Now she makes a Jell-o-tini although she says, “That’s not a very good name for it, is it? I need to come up with something with a retro twist.”

In any case, if she’s got time in the afternoon (and often she doesn’t), she’ll make Jell-o shooters from vodka and Sour Apple Pucker schnapps, put the cubes in a cute little martini glass, top with a little whip cream, and take them out to guests lounging around the pool in the late afternoon.

“It’s just a fun thing,” she says. “And I’m all about fun.”

Okay, yes, Jell-o shots are fun. But I don’t know. I kind of miss the Mod-tini.

Laura Slipak at The Mod Resort in Palm Desert. Yeah, baby!

One of the fun things about the desert is that it attracts a lot of interesting people. Like Laura Slipak. I met Laura, an Argentinean fashion designer who owns The Mod Resort in Palm Desert, a couple of years ago. I dragged my sorry ass into her Austin Powers-chic hotel after a long, hot drive from Los Angeles and she took one look at me and, before I’d even registered, offered me a martini. So, yeah, you go to a nice resort in Hawaii and they bring you a cold washcloth and some tropical punch while you’re signing in, but when was the last time someone offered to make you a martini while you registered? Never.

I knew immediately that Laura and I were going to hit it off, and we did. Here’s another thing I liked: Laura told me I could have my pick of rooms. So while I sipped my martini, she took me on a little tour of the vacant rooms, which were all very stylish, very well done (as you’d imagine they would be since she designed them), giving me little bits and pieces of her life and the history of The Mod which, before she bought it five years ago this month was called the Desert Patch Inn and was, she says as she sashays past the pool, “every bit as tacky as its name.”

I asked Laura how she came to own a hotel, and this is what she told me: One night, while she was living in Malibu, she went to the Viceroy, a very hip Santa Monica hotel known for their retro-chic design (dog-shaped lamps, lime-green accents, lots of black, white, and gray), and “I thought to myself, I can do this.”

So first Laura bought a house out here, two doors down, “and I’d walk by the Desert Patch Inn and think about what I’d do to it if I owned it. So I bought it. But then I had to decorate it.”

“I had a yard sale to get rid of all the crappy old furniture they had and by the 4^th day, I was actually paying people to haul away the junk that hadn’t sold,” she told me. Then she started buying vintage furniture at estate sales and on eBay. “God, what a process.”

The result, she says, is not really authentic mid-century. “I call it Mod-century. It’s more late 60s and early 70s. If Frank Sinatra and Austin Powers picked a place to stay, this would be it. Because it’s retro, but it’s not kitschy. Does that make sense?”

Yeah, baby!