Sinatra and Austin Powers at The Mod

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!