The Bob Hope House and the Desert Classic
Near Palm Springs, California
On a ridge high above the south end of the valley sits one of the strangest houses in America, a vast curving dome that locals compare to a mushroom, a volcano, or a crashed flying saucer. It was the home of the comedian Bob Hope and his wife Dolores, designed by the modernist architect John Lautner, a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright. Commissioned in nineteen seventy-three, the vast house had a rough start when a welder accidentally set the wooden frame on fire, and the Hopes had to wait years to move in.
Its sweeping roof opens to the sky through a great circular skylight in the center. Bob Hope's name is stamped all over the desert, but nowhere more than on golf. The tournament that began in nineteen sixty as the Palm Springs Golf Classic was renamed the Bob Hope Desert Classic in nineteen sixty-five.
Hope turned it into a celebrity spectacle, pairing touring professionals with movie stars and even sitting presidents. Every January the Hopes would throw a grand party at the dome house to close out the tournament, their terrace filled with guests. More than any single figure, Bob Hope tied Palm Springs to the game of golf in the public imagination.
