2025 Architectural Preservation Awards Honors Five Projects and People in Palm Springs

Preservation is an act of defiance — against indifference, demolition permits, and the slow creep of  time. The Palm Springs Modern Committee’s annual Architectural Preservation Awards celebrate that spirit in all its forms: painstaking restorations, daring revivals, and new designs that honor the city’s singular architectural DNA.

On Saturday, Oct. 11, PS ModCom will recognize five projects and individuals for their contributions to preservation, restoration, and new design. The evening, produced in partnership with Palm Springs Life, begins with an awards ceremony at the Annenberg Theater, followed by a cocktail reception and dinner amid the artwork at Palm Springs Art Museum.

This year’s honorees reveal the many ways people engage with the past and carry it forward. “Sometimes that means meticulous restoration; other times, it’s about channeling the spirit of  the past into something new,” says Nickie McLaughlin, executive director of  PS ModCom. “Either way, the new wave of preservation is more diverse, more design-conscious, and more rooted in stewardship than ever before.”

These are their stories.

Koerner Residence

Residential Restoration

David Wright bought the Koerner Residence in 2018 for the same reason Leon and Thea Koerner commissioned architect E. Stewart Williams to design it in 1955. They were chasing the sun — the Koerners escaping Canadian winters and Wright seeking respite from L.A.’s looming marine layer. Though Wright, who works in commercial real estate, had no previous ties to midcentury landmarks, he views architecture as high art. For this private commission from Williams, the titan behind the Palm Springs Art Museum and Frank Sinatra’s Twin Palms estate, there may have been no better steward to ensure the L-shaped, post-and-beam home in Deepwell Estates was faithfully restored.

“I don’t associate myself with the outcome of the restoration,” Wright says. “The plans already existed. I just followed directions. That doesn’t take any special creativity.”

Maybe not, but only a formalist’s heart can return a house of such distinguished provenance to its original glory.

Over 18 months, Wright and his contractors reversed decades of unsympathetic changes. Walls that had been awkwardly pushed out toward the pool were pulled back to the 1955  footprint; the original glass curtain wall was restored, reclaiming San Jacinto Mountain views; and later additions like a solarium, which distorted the home’s lines, were removed entirely.

“The house just got its proportions back,” Wright says.

Less surgical work included stripping old paint from interior surfaces to reveal original colors and wood finishes. The tongue-and-groove ceilings (ship-like in their breadth and joinery) and the vertical board-and-batten walls (evoking a breezy cabana stripe) were sandblasted to bring out the natural woodgrain before repainting. Original walnut built-ins were revived in the main house and replicated in the new backyard casita — the home’s only modern addition, designed in Williams’ vernacular to integrate seamlessly with the existing specs.

But for all the attention dutifully paid to the main house, Wright believes it may be the wrong headliner. “From my perspective,” he says, “the garden makes the joint.”

The Koerner Residence was one of the few projects to unite Williams with Garrett Eckbo and Robert Royston — both pioneers of modern landscape architecture — resulting in a design where house and garden were conceived as one. Just as Williams’ residential blueprints were followed to a T-square, the trio’s landscape design was meticulously re-created by Bay Area landscape architect JC Miller, who interpreted the sculptural yet elemental desert vision using surviving hardscape and vintage Julius Shulman photographs. Miller brought the right pedigree to the job: He once worked in Royston’s office.

Over time, the berms were leveled, shade structures dismantled, and Eckbo’s sculptural fountains rusted beyond repair. Grassy lawns had overtaken the planting beds, and dramatic hedges that once shaped the welcome approach had vanished. But some key elements endured, like the “giant, blistered, desert-varnished rocks with really cool shapes,” as Wright describes them. Miller worked around this original hardscape while introducing desert-adapted perennials like red penstemon, white-flowering India hawthorn, and gazania groundcover — plants that align with Eckbo’s low-and-layered desert aesthetic and nod to the original palette. The arbor was rebuilt and the fountains re-created with custom metal forms. “At no point were less-authentic choices ever considered,” Miller says.

Restoring a house like this meant making hundreds of careful decisions, each one bringing it closer to what Williams, Eckbo, and Royston originally envisioned. The effort secured the property’s Class 1 Historic Resource designation from the city of Palm Springs. “When it’s really well done, everything  just clicks,” Wright says. “The alchemy raises your vibration and creates a space you want to float around in.”

Peter Moruzzi

Lifetime Achievement

In summer 1994, at the dawn of what would become his 30-year preservation career, Peter Moruzzi  joined a cast of costumed activists from the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee to protest the demolition of  the country’s first McDonald’s drive-in, a Googie landmark in Downey, California. One dressed as Speedee, the fast-food chain’s pre-clown mascot, while another parodied a coffin. A third wore a suit.

“Someone had to look respectable, so we’d be taken seriously. It might as well have been me,” Moruzzi says. At the time, he was a 30-something Bay Area tech refugee who had moved south to attend the American Film Institute. Instead, he found himself captivated by the cinematic landscape of midcentury architecture — a crisp, linear, sun-worshipping counterpoint  to the prim Victorian buildings he’d grown up admiring in Massachusetts.

After relocating to the desert in 1999, Moruzzi founded the Palm Springs Modern Committee to spearhead protections for threatened sites. Among them: Albert Frey’s Fire Station No. 1, the Tramway Gas Station (now Palm Springs Visitor Center), and Royal Hawaiian Estates, which became the Coachella
Valley’s first historic residential district.

Most of  Moruzzi’s projects have received landmark protections, a twist of  fate few register because familiar touchstones can mask how fragile the landscape really is. In this way, stewardship is often unsung, whether you’re saving what’s always been there or honoring what’s distantly faded.

“Architecture tells our story,” he says. “If you erase it, you erase part of  who we are.”

Despite being stitched into the Kodachrome quilt of pop culture, some famous locations have required Moruzzi’s intervention. The El Cortez in Las Vegas, a 1941 Spanish Revival hotel preserved through Moruzzi’s advocacy, appeared in Casino. Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, designated a landmark in 1993 after a preservation campaign, cameoed in Heat and Mulholland Drive. Playing by Heart and Nurse Betty give screen time to Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House No. 22 in the Hollywood Hills; it earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 through a multi-property nomination co-authored by Moruzzi.

With credits rolling — as they do in the context of  lifetime achievement — painful losses also deserve billing for the awareness they create. Moruzzi  is candid about the casualties that ensued under his watch, which include the Victor Gruen–designed Alpha Beta market in Palm Springs and Ships Coffee Shop in L.A.’s Westwood neighborhood. As a stern reminder that destruction is swift, but preservation is not, Moruzzi led the outcry over the nightlong demolition of Richard Neutra’s Maslon House in Rancho Mirage.

Though he couldn’t prevent the demise of   this rare desert Neutra (only the Kaufmann and Grace Lewis Miller houses remain), the ordinances he helped shape in response are testament to how defeat can still advance the cause. “I’m optimistic by nature,” Moruzzi says. “If  I weren’t, I’d have given up a long time ago.”

Hermann Bungalows

Excellence in New Design

The link between madness and artistry is hardly tenuous, and hotelier-designer Steve Hermann is the first to admit that his own “delusion” fueled the creation of the Hermann Bungalows, his first hotel from scratch. Opened in 2022 on an empty parcel beside L’Horizon — the 1952 William Cody–designed microresort Hermann revived years earlier — the bungalows could have been a faithful facsimile of the historic, low-slung, planar structures, all whitewashed slump stone and glass. Copy, paste, repeat.

“But I didn’t want to build replicas that would always be compared to the originals,” says Hermann, who admits to a disdain for what he calls the “Disneyland” tendency of  Palm Springs hotels to cling to a theme-park version of midcentury style. “I wanted to build something that nodded back to the era but wasn’t stuck in it,” he says. Hermann set a high bar for his “ultra-luxury” bungalows, drawing on the clean, timeless modernism of Richard Neutra and the layered elegance of Spanish architect and designer Patricia Urquiola’s Il Sereno on Lake Como — the finest lodging he says he has ever experienced. “Since I overdo everything I touch,” he says, “it was hard for me to say, ‘That’s good enough.’ ”

The 24 Hermann Bungalows flank an 85-foot, zero-edge wading pool oriented to frame the San Jacinto Mountains. Each pairs 18 feet of floor-to-ceiling glass in deliberate contrast with exterior walls of desert masonry that extend seamlessly indoors in midcentury fashion, echoing what the designer likens to the “golds and bronzes that got baked over millennia into those hills.”

The low, horizontal profiles and restrained forms nod to Neutra, Hermann says, while the interiors, more spacious than those at L’Horizon, offer “more grandeur and comfort.”

Urquiola’s influence surfaces in the custom Italian and residential-grade finishes. The walnut paneling is vertically fluted, providing texture, shadow, and rhythm; the terrazzo floors are laid with oversize chips (each 4-by-4-foot slab weighs 600 pounds); and the hearths and countertops, made of thick slab marble, reinforce a sense of permanence. Imported Italian glass doors, familiar from Hermann’s high-end residential work, add the final note of refinement. “If  they’re good enough for Larry Ellison and the Saudi royal family,” he says, “they’re good enough for Hermann Bungalows.”

It’s a moment of self-awareness for the hotelier, who says he had an “audience of one” for this project — a mindset he credits to music producer Rick Rubin, who has long maintained that trying to please others can “dilute the work” and “undermine the creative process.”

Hermann admits he “threw out the budget” on the wholehearted belief that the property “would make it up on the back end.” The gamble, from a hotelier who also owns The Colony Palms Hotel and Bungalows — a onetime mobster’s retreat reimagined with geometric art deco flourishes and breathy Hollywood glamour — has paid off in impossible-to-snag reservations (“I can’t even get them for myself,” he says) and a clientele that includes billionaires, Hollywood elite, and more than one ex-POTUS.

“Hermann Bungalows is as perfect as I’m capable of making something,” he says.

garber Residence

Residential Preservation

Design covenants in Southridge — a small Palm Springs enclave of 21 architectural gems by modernist greats like John Lautner, Hugh Kaptur, and Buff & Hensman — exist to protect one thing: the panoramic sweep of the Coachella Valley, from the chisel of midcentury buildings to the lush flora of urban oases. For the new owner of the Garber Residence, perched high on Southridge’s upper slope, that vista is its most commanding feature.

“Oh, the view absolutely comes first,” says the homeowner, who prefers to remain anonymous. He experienced a full-circle moment when he purchased the property in 2023 from the family of original owners Harry and Betty Garber. The couple had taken him under their wing when he moved to the desert some 30 years ago. “When I walked in, there was this sense of space — the valley framed with distant mountains, some a little closer, and others nearby,” he says. “It felt like being nestled into a hill, looking out at everything.”

The Garbers commissioned the home from architect Rick Harrison, who worked under William Cody (also represented in Southridge) and later partnered with Donald Wexler. For the interiors, Harrison collaborated with Arthur Elrod, the city’s most sought-after designer of the era. By the 1970s, modernism’s rigidity had begun to soften under regional influences. The Garber Residence, designated a Class 1 Historic Resource by the city in March 2025, combines the crisp lines, concrete block, and steel structural supports of midcentury post-and-beam construction with romantic Spanish Colonial elements: red-clay barrel tiles, large-chip terrazzo stairs, scrolling wrought-iron rails, and glazed ceramic floors. “I feel like I’m living in 1970s Acapulco,” the homeowner says.

The Garbers, who remained in the home into their 90s, were faithful stewards of the custom dwelling, though the new homeowner has since reversed a few later renovations to bring it closer to its original design. Chief among these changes were the removal of an elevator, added for aging in place, and the elimination of a garage door to restore the street view of an original art piece embedded in one of the carport’s concrete walls. He also added solar panels and updated the HVAC system.

His attention has recently turned to more tailored restorations, including replacing rotted wood window frames and three large plate-glass expanses that were damaged. The kitchen’s defunct Ronco gizmos — countertop built-ins that hydraulically popped up to crush ice or juice citrus — were swapped out for working vintage models, an homage to Betty Garber, who reportedly used them daily. The tangerine-hued laminate and original cabinet hardware remain intact, and the California poppies wallpaper that once blossomed above the cabinets will be faithfully reproduced. All of it is part of Elrod’s original kitchen design.

Though inheriting a well-kept home has taken the edge off the restoration work, the homeowner figures he’s only halfway to the finish line. He’s done this before with another architecturally significant property in Palm Springs, so he knows what it takes. Just don’t call him a serial restorer.

“I have no intention of flipping this house,” he says. “I was in my last one for 24 years. I believe we’re caretakers of these places, here to protect a piece of history until the next person can carry it forward. I’ll probably even have to put in a fancier elevator someday.”

Its smooth curves and horizontal speed lines hint at the aerodynamic signature of the Streamline Moderne style, making the building an architectural aberration in a desert dominated by glassy, boxy modernism — not unlike its vernacular cousin, the 1923 Oasis Hotel. Originally home to Simpson’s Radio & Frigidaire shop, the structure predates the postwar building boom, yet owner Clarence Simpson, a founding member of the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce, seemed to view it as a beacon of hope during the Depression. From 1950 to 2017, it housed The Cork ’n Bottle liquor store.

By the time Murphy and Keasler bought the property in 2018, it was, as Murphy puts it, “sunworn, sandblown, and tired, just like everyone who lives in the desert feels at some point.” Its weathered condition extended beyond appearances, with serious electrical and structural issues. The couple chose to tackle them head-on, restoring the entire structure rather than just the street-facing façade — the only part protected under the city’s Class 1 Historic Site designation. One competing bidder proposed building a new hotel behind it, an idea that quickly drew cries of   “façadism” from the community.

Shoring up the roof was the most precarious part. Once old appliances and nine decades’ worth of roofing buildup (including “literal tons of rock”) were removed, the roof  bowed nearly 21 inches in a slumping display of exhaustion. “I thought we were going to lose the building for sure,” says Murphy, a civil engineer formally trained as an architect.

The original trusses were kept to preserve character, with new ones added to carry the load. The clock tower was reinforced, and insulated windows installed to improve energy efficiency. An exterior wainscot of heat-cracked black tile was replaced with Spanish marble for the same look but better durability. As layers of exterior paint — from green to mauve — were stripped away, the building was recoated in its original palette: bright white on the “upward movements,” as Murphy calls the vertical forms, and soft
gray on the crenellations.

Because the original Cork ’n Bottle sign was beyond repair and “hanging on by one loose screw,” Murphy had it removed for public safety, liberating the building from any expectation of returning to its liquor-store past. In its place, the front windows now display marketing for ModMansions, the vacation rental company Murphy and Keasler run, complete with a staged midcentury-style living room featuring an Eames chair. Inside, the rest of the space serves as a gym and conference room for their guests.

Though no longer open to the public, the downtown building remains a beacon just as Simpson intended. Murphy replaced the neon with programmable LEDs that can light up the exterior in any combination of colors at the push of a button. The Cork ’n Bottle no longer sells spirits, but still lifts them.