Frank Sinatra's Desert House

The house nearby, on Alejo Road, was built for Frank Sinatra in nineteen forty-seven by an architect named E. Stewart Williams. Williams was thirty-seven years old when he got the commission. He went on to design some of the most significant mid-century civic and residential architecture in Palm Springs, but this was the beginning.

The design problem was specific. Sinatra wanted a desert house that felt like Sinatra: the pool is piano-shaped, which was not an accident. The bar inside is piano-shaped as well. The living room contained a grand piano. The whole structure was oriented toward the San Jacinto Mountains to the west, which served as the view from every room that mattered.

Sinatra called the estate Twin Palms, after the two palms at the entry. He used it as his primary Palm Springs base through his most productive years. The desert offered something Los Angeles could not: genuine distance from the machinery of Hollywood publicity, the constant management of image that the studio system required. The Rat Pack gathered here informally, beyond the reach of the photographers who tracked them in Los Angeles.

E. Stewart Williams went on to design other landmarks in Palm Springs: the original Tramway Gas Station, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the Coachella Valley Savings building. His career was shaped by what he learned building a piano-shaped pool for a man who wanted somewhere to be himself.

The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is currently a vacation rental. The bar is still shaped like a piano.