Willamette Week

Stay in Style… Palm Springs for Portlanders

by Elizabeth Dye

April in Portland: The city shivers under that bogus winter-white light that masquerades as spring sunshine. Stores stock bikinis to torture the native gamely trudging to work. Hardy PDXers are left to console themselves with the scent of sprouting bulbs and button up their mackies until July.

Well, not every Portlander.

Forget bi-coastal, bisexual, or bipolar – the cosmopolitan lifestyle of choice is bi-climate. P-folk with panache have been flocking south to Palm Springs for a century now. And it’s time the rest of us rode that indoor/outdoor breeze. Because, you see, P.S. is having a style surge. Wanting to take advantage of mid-century modern mania, I decided to venture on my own to this land of supermarkets, motor courts and modular homes designed by the likes of Albert Frey and Richard Neutra. Plus, a good scorching suntan would be nice. Enter Palm Springs.

After a nice long drive, I parked my cha-cha heels at the Orbit In, owned by Portlanders Christy Eugenis and Stan Amy (he started Nature’s and New Seasons). Christy has embarked on stylish projects before; she ran a fashionable boutique in circa ’80s Rose City called Nanu, which I frequented as an aspiring alterna-teen hunting leopard pillbox hats and pointy goth shoes. Wanting somewhere sunny and within quick driving/flying distance from Portland, style-seeking Christy recently picked Palm Springs and the Orbit In as her latest project. A 1957 flat-lined motel, the Orbit In is a painstaking tribute to the era of mid-century modern designers. Each room is christened with a luminary’s name and styled according to his/her aesthetic. I stayed in the Charles and Ray Eames studio, decked with photographs of the famous pair taken by Julius Shulman. Amenities cater to the design-minded–matched sets of Melmac dishware, Schwinn cruisers for touring town. The hotel’s look is crisp and spare, as the designers it honors would have insisted, but Amy and Eugenis preserved the hotel’s ’50s features–aluminum clocks recessed into the walls, pastel-tiled bathrooms and kitchenettes. With its air of comfortable exactness, the Orbit In welcomes jaded trendsters seeking a vacation from everything except their own taste.