The Art of Travel
Strapped for time? A vulture for culture? Imagine a weekend away, immersing yourself in the arts — high and low — without ever having to leave your hotel. Here’s a look at two illuminating desert oases — Las Vegas’ towering CityCenter and Miracle Hill in Desert Hot Springs.
By Irene Lacher 06/01/2010
CityCenter / Las Vegas
Clearly, CityCenter was envisioned long before the economy took a dive. In these penny-pinching times, one can only marvel at the awesome ambition of MGM Mirage’s vast new city within a city, bringing together eight world-class architects and a $40 million collection of marquee modern and contemporary art. The ill-timed $8 billion hotel-and-retail development even recently sparked rumors that it would force its parent company into bankruptcy, prompting MGM Mirage to issue an unusual press release in late March declaring that the company had made its pending $200 million loan payment.
But from the traveler’s perspective, there’s plenty to be thankful for: Las Vegas is finally growing up. The end of the 20th century may have been all about fake Eiffel Towers and Statues of Liberty, but with the new millennium, the desert playground is becoming far more sophisticated — less flash, more style.
CityCenter opened in December, unveiling diverse structures by important architects whose designs were intended to complement each other and form a dazzling whole: Daniel Libeskind, famously the master architect of the reconstruction of New York’s World Trade Center site, was the lead architect on the Crystals Retail & Entertainment District, a deconstructed luxury shopping center that aspires to the panache of Disney Hall. At Aria Resort & Casino, a sleek, LEED-certified hotel with 4,000 rooms towering 61 stories over the Las Vegas Strip, the lead architect was César Pelli’s firm, Pelli Clarke Pelli, which also designed Orange County’s divine Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. The lead architect of the more intimate and lush Mandarin Oriental, Las Vegas, was New York’s Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, while design of the all-suite Vdara Hotel & Spa was shepherded by RV Architecture in New York.
Fortunately for guests, MGM Mirage had allocated nearly its entire art budget before the economy tanked, and the result is a collection that alone is worth the trip. My favorite piece was Jenny Holzer’s commissioned Vegas, a ribbon of 18-foot-high LED panels projecting sinuous white-light rivers of the artist’s famous “Truisms” and other phrases in one of Aria’s valet parking areas. Other artists on permanent exhibition include Nancy Rubins, Henry Moore, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Maya Lin and Anthony Gormley.
As for performing arts, Aria is home to my new favorite Cirque du Soleil show on the Cirque-saturated Strip — Viva Elvis — and I’m no Elvis fan. The latest show from the constantly evolving company employs much more high-energy dance and imaginative multi-media than its predecessors, leaving even the most jaded Cirque followers breathless.
Of course, to harness the energy for your explorations, you’ll need to eat at fabulous restaurants, and CityCenter continues Las Vegas’ recent welcome tradition of recruiting culinary superstars — such as Michael Mina, Julian Serrano, Sirio Maccioni and Todd English. If you’re still a Neolithic red-meat eater like I am, don’t miss Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Jean-Georges, with its perfectly prepared steaks, including wallet-busting Kobe beef, and homemade ginger soda.
After all that, you might want to collapse in your room, which, if you’re lucky, will have one of the best views in town. Aria’s spacious rooms amazingly start at only $149 (although if you want to drop $6,000 a night on a two-level, three-bedroom Sky Villa with its own butler and shampoo room, feel free). Put your key in the door and the high-tech room will even turn on the lights and music and open the curtains for you. All you have to do is nothing, which happens to be my favorite vacation activity.
Visit citycenter.com.
Miracle Hill / Desert Hot Springs
Some of the best places to go are ones where you really have to know where you’re going, spots tucked away on a lightly traveled road with unobtrusive signs that require reading glasses. Miracle Hill is such a place, actually the place it all started in Desert Hot Springs, outside Joshua Tree National Park.
What’s the miracle? The aquifer of geothermal mineral waters 400 feet below the surface. At the top of the hill sits the quirky adobe home of the late Cabot Yerxa, the artist-adventurer who discovered the hot (and cold) springs in the San Bernardino Mountain foothills in 1913. Now operated by the state of California as Cabot’s Pueblo Museum, the house that Yerxa built is a 5,000-square-foot Hopi-style pueblo made of scrap wood and old metal advertising signs. Yerxa constructed it from 1941 until 1965, when he died at age 83. By then, he’d expanded the place into 35 rooms with 150 windows and 65 doors. But who’s counting?
Fortunately for travelers, there are a handful of bed and breakfasts down the hill that are somewhat more stylish. But the area still retains the artsy ambience of Yerxa’s day when, after studying art in Paris, he returned to Desert Hot Springs to turn his home into a Taos, New Mexico–like gathering place for kindred creative spirits.
Just across the street from Cabot’s place is the Miracle Manor Retreat, transformed by prominent Los Angeles architect Michael Rotundi and artist/designer April Greiman from a pedestrian midcentury motel into a temple to desert minimalism. The sustainable inn’s six rooms (two with full kitchens) are washed in ivory and pale gray, with splashes of neon yellow and orange. A Zen rock garden adorns the courtyard, leading to two geothermal pools for serious relaxation.
The spare furnishings and landscaping will appeal to a certain breed of aesthete, the sort who will dig the owners’ mission statement on their website: “Here, where space is the object itself, Greiman and Rotondi are the invisible force, allowing nature to do its thing.”
Room rates, including breakfast, start at $125 from May through October. Two-night packages, including signature massage services, start at $450.
If you’re dedicated to your creature comforts, then know that so is William Dailey, a Los Angeles–based rare book seller who owns the Hacienda Hot Springs Inn down the hill from Miracle Manor. Dailey bought the rundown midcentury motel in 2003, then stripped it to the bones and redesigned and rebuilt it as a cozy six-room B&B.
So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the eco-friendly Hacienda is the kind of place where one could spend an entire weekend reading (try one of the vintage books about desert culture tucked in every room) and melting in the waters of its toasty mineral pools and lagoon, set in a tranquil garden created by landscape designer and organic farmer Bettina Birch.
With kitchen facilities in each room, you’d never have to leave, but you wouldn’t want to miss the homemade granola at the breakfast buffet on the patio each morning. That will gird you for the rigors of sampling the Hacienda’s extensive spa menu, which features more than four times as many offerings as the motel has rooms.
Dailey’s passion for collecting and desert culture inspired his decorating style; the place is filled with Arts & Crafts furniture and desert photographs, paintings and memorabilia. His prized collection of vintage desert postcards is labeled and preserved in a vitrine in the library, where you can kick back before a roaring fireplace. If you’re lucky, you might cross paths with Dailey on one of his visits, when he imports his own Taos-like gatherings of booksellers, professors and artists.
Summer rates from July 6 through Oct. 7 start at $99.
For information about Cabot’s Pueblo Museum, visit cabotsmuseum.org. For Miracle Manor, see miraclemanor.com. For Hacienda Hot Springs, go to haciendahotsprings.com.
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Cabot's Pueblo Museum is operated by the City of Desert Hot Springs, not by the State of California.