A desert home that comes first
I RECENTLY surprised myself, and everyone who knows me, by buying a house in Palm Springs. Sure, lots of people in L.A. buy homes in Palm Springs -- second homes. Not me. In a glorious celebration of backward living, we bought our second home first.
Greg and I first came to the desert to celebrate our fifth anniversary at Two Bunch Palms, the famed resort where you can soak in a hot mud bath while you “soften your gaze” at Al Capone’s hideaway. On the way home we stopped at thrift stores, junkyards and the dig-your-own cactus place, trying to make the weekend last. We bought two life-size concrete dove lawn ornaments.
Back in our one-bedroom Hollywood garden apartment, we positioned them carefully in the pot under an indoor palm. Because it had been our anniversary, and they were doves, the love bird, we saw them as tchotchke versions of ourselves. They survived moves to apartments in Los Feliz and Hancock Park -- or Baja Hancock Park, as I heard the matrons in the mansions above Wilshire call our block.
Last June I opened the front door to say hello to the impossibly blue sky of a perfect L.A. morning. I saw that Greg had moved one of the birds to a planter that hung at eye level by our front door. I laughed. It cooed. I screamed. The bird was nesting. Another bird -- a real bird. I decided it was a sign that all was well with our nest, that our new landlord, who we were sure was going to evict us, wouldn’t.
The next day we got the eviction notice. Not for running a meth lab or anything glamorous, he was just moving his family in. We had 60 days to get out.
We happened to have a little money. Not enough money to bother looking at the three-bedroom modern house in the hills that we wanted. Not even enough money to look at the three-bedroom condos in West Hollywood we thought would be OK, or enough money to win the bidding war on a musty smelling Echo Park cottage.
People suggested we look in Mt. Washington. Where is Mt. Washington? I would ask. Just over the 2, they would say. Where’s the 2? One day we took out the Thomas Guide and found it. Even while we were there I didn’t know where we were. If we’re going to live this far, we may as well live in Palm Springs, I joked.
That’s the best idea you ever had, said Greg. On the way home we hatched a scheme to buy in the beautiful, more affordable place that we love and come into L.A. for business and shows on an as-needed basis.
We figured we’d get a small pied-a-terre in town (a year later we are still staying in guest rooms and at hotels) and buy a house where there were still houses under $500,000 that you didn’t have to Photoshop details out of in order to digest your food properly. When we got home from hatching this crazy scheme, the very real eggs of the very real bird also hatched.
Two eggs. Two cities. Kismet ensued. Chance encounters, coded messages and an I Ching throw later, we’d bought a house in Palm Springs. The first morning we woke up where I live there were hundreds of doves on the telephone wire in our backyard welcoming us home.
They call Palm Springs the gay ‘90s: You’re either gay or you’re 90. Or you’re us: beauty junkies on a budget. Our house is a midcentury Modern -- you know, one of those Jetsons houses. So I live in the future -- of 40 years ago. Our house is a Meiselman. Meiselman was the “other” builder of midcentury Modern tract homes in Palm Springs. A lot of people have very strong feelings about Alexander versus Meiselman. My strong feeling is that our Meiselman was available, affordable and had a mountain view.
For the first few months I lived here, I felt like the mountain was my new boyfriend. I would think about it when I was in L.A. or on the road -- the places I work in order to have the house that has the mountain view.
People take their orange front doors very seriously here. They take architecture and decor seriously in general. I hate to buckle to “what’s done” but the orange proved irresistible. It’s the second chakra color -- the sexy chakra -- and Palm Springs is a sexy, nude-resorty, spa-filled, body-feels-good-from-swimming, happy-hour kind of town. The red feng shui mandated door I’d dreamed about looked too overheated in the blazing desert sun, the same unrelenting sun that makes anything gold seem like it’s heating the room another 20 degrees. If it was gold we tossed it, traded it for cooler silver and chrome, stored it or painted it glossy black and white. It is, after all, sometimes 120 degrees where I live.
Our whole house is about flow -- the winds that blow in this part of town, the classic indoor-outdoor floor plan, repeated circular elements, the “going with the flow” we did to end up in it. So instead of filling up the house with expensive furniture, we magnified the flow.
Which was coherent with our philosophy of spending money on a pool and steel wall and 45 tons of white gravel in the backyard and then buying cheap mirrors to reflect it and shiny chrome and silver items to amplify it.
We might have gone a little overboard. The reflective silver and white disco/lotus curtains, made from jersey from downtown L.A. and grommeted by Greg, which flow and sweep across two walls of my dressing/yoga room are reflected in the bathroom mirror which is set on a perfect Inferno Red wall (it’s a color made by a company called Scuffmaster that we ordered from Wolf-Gordon at the Pacific Design Center, but splurge on paint if you only need one gallon).
Over the stove, we’ve hung one of those great steel framed IKEA mirrors. And now you can see the pool out back and above it the palm tree out front -- because we put mirrors inside the cabinets above the sink. If you look through the living room slider to the living room mirror it appears that you are standing inside your own head inside a mountain.
Collage? Dream? Interior design? Flow.
I live in a flight path. That took a while to sink in. Yes, our real estate agent told us the steel framed windows we admired were new and had been put in by the city as part of a “noise abatement program,” but I had the partial hearing loss of a desperate house hunter and only heard “new.” Six months later, as the adrenaline rush and construction noise died down, I was literally shaken by the roar of a 747 flying 30 feet above my head.
The flight path has become the perfect symbol for where I live. A flight path suggests being on-the-move. And my life in two cities, one where I have no home, requires constant travel. A flight path is about looking up, to the mountain, the palm trees, the celestory windows, the windmills, the wind, the good fortune that brought me here.
Some days, as the planes fly over my house, scattering the birds, I think about crashes, “War of the Worlds,” military planes and conspiracies. But some days I think of angels, “E.T.” people I love who live far away and the abundant butterflies of our first spring here.
When a plane is gone, the shadow passed and the roar quiet, it’s like the silence after an ohm -- much more profound than the silence before it. I am glad I am not jet-setting away -- right now. I’m glad I am here, in the clarity of the desert, in my second house, which I had the good sense to buy first.
Beth Lapides is a writer, comedian, artist and actress best known for creating and hosting Un-Cabaret. She can be reached at beth@uncabaret.com.
