Sagewater
Desert Hot Springs, CA2006-2008
Vectoral behavior, this time modeling water flow, was even more central to our proposal to expand the Sagewater Hotel and Spa in 2008. Water is both scarce and profuse in Desert Hot Springs, a working-class hamlet ten miles north of Palm Springs, in the Coachella Valley. Sagewater Spa, like many spa-tels built there in the 1950s, took a long slide into disrepair, only to be resurrected in the last 25 years. The current Sagewater is comprised of a “J” of rooms lining the perimeter of one lot and opening onto a deck with a 40ft pool and jacuzzi. The owners were able to purchase the four open lots to the south of the Sagewater, as well as a fifth with an existing house on it.
Our design unifies the properties into a single desert retreat, with new treatment rooms, new manager’s quarters, and a new pool and sundeck at the south lot joined to the existing Sagewater by a desert garden traversing the lots in between. The ground floor of the house to the south would be renovated to provide three treatment rooms, a soaking room, and a yoga studio, as well as a panoramic suite for the Spa’s owners. An intermittent shade structure with reflective pools, seating, and framed views of the San Jacinto Mountains runs the length of the six lots, linking Sagewater North and South, as the original and renovated properties at either end will be known. A new point of entry from the open lot next to the south building brings guests first to the south spa, then up to the north accommodations. Though the four intermediate lots would remain open-air, the terracing and shade will serpentine up the site to allow for possible future development in between.
Three western US ecological zones intersect in Desert Hot Springs: the Colorado, Mojave, and the Sonora zones. Though each is distinct, many species of plant and animal life overlap between two or all three zones. At the Sagewater, all the topographical rises of the site would be planted in bands indigenous to each zone, establishing a series of retaining datum lines across the width of the site. A “fourth ecology” of citrus and herbs will be interspersed near paths and the north and south buildings for Spa use.
The design responds to hydrodynamics throughout. If rain from above is scarce and the water pressure from below is unusually strong, the currents that periodically traverse the site as annual runoff and cyclical flooding actually do the most, in combination with the wind, to shape the existing topography. The superstructure of the shade is generated by a reflective modeling of Desert Hot Springs’ light dapple of rainfall into an array of support lines “bounced” off the existing slope. The master-planning, circulation, and topographic refinement of the site all reflect and mitigate the coursing of the 50-year flood plane.