It Only Looks Simple

Even jet-setters land occasionally. Here’s where the 
founders of Korakia 
and Sparrows Lodge 
turn off their engines.

Lisa Marie Hart Hotels & Resorts

“It’s so quiet up here. There are not a lot of full-time residents, and the house benefits from the curl of land so there’s no traffic noise.”
Photography by David Blank

 

Doug and Josie Smith are the couple you’d love to meet at an up-and-coming boutique hotel on the first day of a long vacation.There would be a quaint, strollable village nearby, cafés for long lunches washed down with a few bottles of wine, a pool for midnight swims, and other guests to join the merriment with fascinating tales of global adventures.

The quintessential boutique hotel experience abroad is the one Doug began creating more than 25 years ago in Palm Springs. Many people know him and Josie as the effortlessly stylish talents behind Korakia Pensione and Sparrows Lodge. Although they have sold both hotels, the former architect and fashion model changed Palm Springs tourism for the better. Twice.

 

Doug’s handcrafted dining table and pool loungers are in balance with the ceiling. Dining chairs are stored until needed for dinner parties.

 

Life on the Ridge

These days, Palm Springs’ own Mr. and Mrs. Smith tour the world as if they work for the airlines, so the above scenario is completely plausible. When they come home to rest and read, however, they’re tucked up on the hill in a rustic Southridge post-and-beam from 1965.

“I love houses,” Doug says. “And I love working on houses. I love to re-create the soul of the house.” Placed on a bluff next to The Cody House, the secluded Smith residence apparently smacked of a 1999 furniture store when the couple purchased it. Now a clean, indoor-outdoor home cupped by the mountains, the home itself seems to call out a soft “namaste” to all who enter. Its mid-’60s linear lines have been coaxed into focus as a result of what has been stripped away. Free of deliberate midcentury references and kitsch, it reflects the hush of the area.

“It’s so quiet up here. There are not a lot of full-time residents, and the house benefits from the curl of land so there’s no traffic noise,” says Doug. “You can walk right out, pick up a trail, and go up and over the mountains.”  They never even bothered to cover the windows. “We watch the moon and stars go by from the bedroom,” he says. “We travel a lot, but this is the home we live in.”

 

Fires dance in sand pits along the 40-foot pool.

 

Redwood ceilings, glass walls, pieced stone, and natural finishes blend the structure with its environs. With a  character that is part day spa, part tree house, the 3,200-square-foot home sits at the end of a private driveway so long it should have a name. The dirt road paves the way for the rustic abode at the end of it, dipping way down then back up, building suspense along the ridge.

“The home is bigger than you first think,” Doug says. “It’s very simple, but that’s the way the houses were built.” When he lived in the Greek islands, Doug became hooked on the unadorned. “Greek houses are built to be simple. They can be 200 years old and it’s just white-washed walls, stone floors, and a dining table.”

Unpretentious yet gated, the 18-home community has drawn the likes of Steve McQueen and Bob Hope in addition to Elrod, Lautner, Kaptur, and Cody. The steep incline of Southridge Drive leads to this smattering of residences built right on the mountain instead of staring at it.

“Our homes have all been fantastic,” Doug says of the 10-plus homes he has renovated in Palm Springs. “We buy our forever house — and that lasts for about two years.” Josie says they fall in love with a home and set to work on it. Before Doug finishes, he’s scratching the itch for another. “He has this amazing gift,” she says. “In 10 minutes he had this house all arranged, designed, and reconfigured in his head. But when they’re two-thirds of the way done, he’s onto the next creative challenge.”

In past years, that drive meant more than a hilltop hideout for two: Doug might love houses, but it’s his local hotels that have received raves worldwide .

 

In the glass living room with south-facing views, nature finds its way indoors. Wood is the favored material for three tables. One displays a nest from a cactus wren Doug found while hiking.

 

The Korakia Years

When he was 40, Doug had an architectural practice in Southern California and had tackled everything from Irvine Company projects to landmark Gothic Revival buildings. “I had a marriage, a divorce, a house in the suburbs. I was working my ass off and raising my daughter by myself,” he says. “I came to Palm Springs in 1989 with $100,000 in the bank and I thought I was rich. I decided to take no more clients. I had lived in the Greek islands before and had a café bar in a hip location. It was one of those places where people used to line up on the street to go in. I started it with Oskar Beckmann, one of the heirs of the José Cuervo business. Mick Jagger and Jackie O came by. It was a very heady time. I got to Palm Springs and realized it was the same weather and mountains. It reminded me of Greece.”

Doug found a run-down apartment building called Baristo Castle and bought it as a house. What he calls the “goofy old Moroccan building” built in the 1920s by a Scottish painter had attracted plein air painters. “That’s when I fell in love with Palm Springs,” he says. While painter Gordon Coutts was re-creating his days in Tangiers, Doug was re-creating his life in Greece. By day, Smith would hike with Albert Frey, who showed him the trails. They took their lunch at the Hilton. “I soon learned Palm Springs was more than pink flamingoes and golf. It was such a sweet time.” Come evening, Doug’s dinner parties at the castle ended in the wee still hours with friends urging him to turn it into a hotel, if only so the party could continue. In 1990, he opened Korakia (Greek for “crows,” the birds Doug saw while hiking the Greek mountains) with several rooms. He grew it slowly like a seed in a pot, later buying the property across the street and adding on.

“It became one of those great gathering places of mixed people that you meet in hotels when traveling around the world,” says Doug. “The clients I had there I could never replicate.” Artists, writers, personalities hung out together in the courtyards. Gore Vidal, John Irving, Trini Lopez, and Annie Leibovitz checked in. Smith likes to say they were almost more famous for whom they turned away. Madonna, Al Pacino, and Brad Pitt called too late; there were no rooms at the inn. Photographers offered their photos for a stay in this new Moroccan oasis that never advertised or had a publicist yet drove the travel publications wild.

In 1997, Condé Nast Traveler shot the bulk of a cover story on Palm Springs at Korakia. In 2000, W magazine singled it out as a paradigm for hotels of the future. “Something clicked and was working,” Doug says. “People were walking to dinner with a glass of wine in their hand, hiking, swimming. And these were really international people.”

The same year, Josie walked in to the hotel. “The first day I saw her I said, ‘You don’t want to get married, do you?’” As a model for Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, and Isaac Mizrahi, Josie had lived in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. As a friend to Doug, she coached him about his bad dating. “When she broke up with her boyfriend, I asked her to come to Korakia to be with me,” he says.  

 

the couple with flat-coated retrievers Bica (Portuguese for “espresso”) and Lollie.

 

Sparrows Fly Home

For many people, the story might stop there, with a nice plump retirement and an annual vacation. The Smiths restored an antebellum plantation in New Orleans and kept a pied-à-terre in New York. They rebuilt a no-electricity horse farm in Portugal from the ground up. (Doug swears they bought it by drawing numbers in the dirt and crossing them out — then sold it in 2011, just hours before the euro crashed.) But they missed the desert.

Back in Palm Springs, they bought a house in the Mesa, then made an offer on the former El Rancho Lodge built on South Palm Canyon in 1951.Their Korakia network heard they were in town and Doug wanted to do one more small hotel, just to see if he could.

“When I designed Sparrows, people didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “But it was the old Smoke Tree Ranch feel. No TVs, no phones, but great Internet all from this little run-down building I think had been a crack den.” More than Korakia, Sparrows flaunts the same modest good looks and raw materials as their Southridge home. They’re each fresh-faced and naturally gorgeous — quite a bit like Josie.

Building the 20-room nest in 2013 took a year longer than the projected one year. “It’s almost impossible now,” Smith says. Once they’d opened, it was déjà vu. Friends flocked back and new friends were made, all via word of mouth. Young record producers mixed with Cirque du Soleil performers. Lawyers and actors and a third-generation riverboat pilot sat around the fire at night. A musician from a well-known rock band plucked at a guitar.

Doug estimates that there were 900 articles and 300 photo shoots at Korakia. But who’s counting? “The same kind of clientele started showing up at Sparrows.” A new golden child among travel journalists, the hotel made Travel + Leisure’s “Best New Hotels” list. (The magazine recognized it again in January.) After a year, they sold it to friends.

“We like this little hotel in Laos on a back street by a wat,” Doug says on a tangent. His anecdotes fall like raindrops that blur into one huge puddle. “There is something so real and tangible about providing a true experience and not making it clever. Most people in Palm Springs are very sophisticated. They are travelers who have seen it all. The clientele are the last element of design, the final element of success. As architect or designer, you have to create the right environment. When you do, the veneer drops down and you never know who you’re going to meet there.”

 

Leather butterfly chairs beckon in the library, where shelves surround on three walls.

 

The Next Forever House

Only the Smiths could bear to part with a renovated midcentury home so warm with redwood splendor. They have their eyes on a cool 1920s Mediterranean made of stone. “It’s an old Spanish house above [Barry] Manilow’s in the Mesa,” Doug says. “It has a great view with roosters and chickens. We call it the ‘Hollywood Hills of Palm Springs.’”

Doug says whenever they’ve been frustrated by losing out on a house they wanted, a better one has come along. “There’s always another fabulous old house in Palm Springs,” he says. “The first thing you learn is patience.” Just for kicks, they’ve also picked up an old planter’s cottage on 100 acres near the Mississippi River, 10 minutes outside of Natchez and populated by armadillos. “Everything is a day away from Palm Springs either by flight or by car,” Josie reasons. “It’s going to be our getaway, like a Big Bear mountain cabin.”

The pair recently returned from Southeast Asia, where they hope to work with a children’s hospital in Cambodia. Josie has taken the lead on their new cultural adventures; Doug says he has been back and forth across the U.S. 15 times in his life. “You know the last great summer you have after high school? We’re still doing them,” he says. “We have a lot of stories. We’ve got a great life.”