After a vacation to Hawaii in the mid-1980s, developer William Bone returned to his Sunrise Company office in the Coachella Valley and called Bill Marriott.
“I want to build the Hyatt Maui at the corner of Cook Street and Country Club Drive on 440 acres,” Bone proclaimed. Marriott, then the CEO of Marriott International, needed little convincing.
“You got a deal,” he responded. “Let’s do it.”
The industrious pair adapted their partnership agreement from the Marriott Rancho Las Palmas Resort of the late 1970s (now the Omni Rancho Las Palmas Resort & Club), and by 1987, the audacious JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa opened on Bone’s land in Palm Desert complete with lakes and golf courses and an eventual flock of flamingos, cementing Bone as the preeminent large-scale developer in Greater Palm Springs. Today, his Sunrise Company employs about 500 people.
At the firm’s headquarters at Indian Ridge Country Club, one of nine club communities Sunrise Company has built in the Coachella Valley, Bone leans back in a chair at the conference table reflecting on his life’s work. Now 82 years old, he recounts his story in a rapid, breathless delivery with frank undertones and humorous timing. Born in Bakersfield, he comes from a farming family and retains his folksy manner and quotidian preferences. (He loves the fried chicken at Tower Market.) His father, Andrew, ended up in the building materials business, for which the young entrepreneur made deliveries during high school and college years.
Two days after graduating from Stanford, Bone returned to Bakersfield to start construction on his first project, a 20-unit apartment building on Q Street. To learn the ins and outs of building, he dug ditches, lugged boards, and poured concrete for his own subcontractors.
“I made more money doing that than my father made in two or three years,” he recalls.
Through Glazer, he met Kemmons Wilson, founder of the Holiday Inn chain. Searching for motel locations, Bone mapped freeway offramps and sought out property owners. “I wound up doing 28 sites for him, getting the plans done and approved, the permits and all that stuff.”
Bone was 27 in 1969 when he came to Palm Springs. With Wilson’s backing, and concurrent with the Benedict Hills project, the William Bone Company purchased the decaying Deepwell Ranch on East Palm Canyon Drive and built 130 homes around three swimming pools and a tennis court. “There were no big builders in second-home communities in California then,” he recalls. “It was a onesie-twosie business.”
Sales chugged along at 30 houses a year; meanwhile, in 1971, Bone purchased 40 acres at Sunrise Way north of Highway 111. He named the new endeavor Sunrise Villas, put in condominiums, and priced the units “at about half” of Deepwell Estates.
“From the time we bought the property, we built, sold, and closed 236 homes in nine months,” he shares. “That was the first time anybody in California had ever turned on high-volume home-building in the second-home environment.”
With that success, he changed his firm’s name to Sunrise Company.
Some grief went with it, though. “Owners, Builder Clash over Sunrise Villas,” The Desert Sun reported. Bone, described by the newspaper as “the youthful developer,” stalled for time to study the owners’ demands. Homeowners sought $52,830 to fix sprinklers, replace dead plantings, and expand the drainage system. Bone offered to settle for $8,750 and threatened to fight any lawsuit “to the Supreme Court.” Meanwhile, he kept a home for himself in the Villas.
He built again at Sunrise East, Sunrise Alejo, and Sunrise Tennis Ranch. Comparing notes with Johnny Dawson, developer of Thunderbird and Marrakesh country clubs, he saw untapped potential in his own method. As if the breezes whispered to him about modernist design’s tenet of repeatability, he realized that instead of custom homes, he could build on a golf course in the lower-cost, mass-production style. The proof of concept in 1973 was Sunrise Country Club, a site acquired in six parcels from Leonard Firestone, architect Welton Becket, actor Phil Harris, local Haig Harris, chainsaw mogul and Lake Havasu developer Robert McCulloch, and the estate of Alan Ladd. “We opened and sold over 300 homes the first weekend. Unbelievable! No one had ever done this in California.”
Next, in 1976, came Rancho Las Palmas Country Club on the site of the former Desert Air resort on Bob Hope Drive. “We tore out the golf course, redesigned it so it would fit around the homes, and built Rancho Las Palmas Country Club,” Bone shares. Another hit: 540 sales on opening day.
He knew Bill Marriott from a desultory effort to develop 10 acres where the Hilton Palm Springs now stands. When Marriott saw Sunrise Country Club, he told Bone, “Wow, I want to be on a golf course like that.” Bone promised to integrate a hotel into Rancho Las Palmas. “So we did, and that was a very successful hotel. We sold that to Equitable Life — and the golf course, too.”
“Bill is a brilliant man,” says Warren Smith, former senior vice president at Sunrise. “He studies and knows his projects in every phase of development, in my opinion, better than any developer.” Smith suggests that Rancho Las Palmas helped to change commercial patterns in the desert. “Until then, the town shut down in the summertime.”
Bone continued moving through the Coachella Valley. Navigating inflation, interest rates, and economic recession — as well as a wild desert sand dune that once ate his Jeep — he acquired and developed 200 to 300 acres each for Monterey Country Club, The Lakes Country Club, and Palm Valley Country Club.
Customer-satisfaction ratings improved. After finishing The Lakes, Bone accepted a plaque of appreciation from its residents. “I’ve been sued several times by homeowners, but never honored by them,” he said during his acceptance. Lakes homeowner Bob Hazen gushed, “Even the sand traps are beautiful!”
By 1985, completing PGA West “at the end of the earth” on a potholed two-lane road, Bone had begun the transformation of La Quinta. And he has continued building ever-more-luxurious communities. Indian Ridge Country Club opened in 1992. Toscana in Indian Wells (2003) and Andalusia in La Quinta (2018) are the most recent.
Today, Bone’s son, Randall, who also holds an MBA from Harvard, serves as CEO of Sunrise Company, and Phillip K. Smith Jr. (father of prominent Coachella Valley artist Phillip K. Smith III) is president and COO. “I’m the chief visionary officer,” the elder Bone says, smoothing his sheaf of white hair. Casting his vision ahead, he adds, “We’re building at Andalusia, and across the street from that on Monroe is farmland — at the end of civilization.” His gaze encompasses thousands of acres along the Salton Sea. “That area in La Quinta and beyond, it’ll look like Palm Desert [and] Rancho Mirage [do] now.”
If he’s right, Salton City may never be the same.
