JOSHUA TREE, Calif. — You never know what's going to turn up in the desert.
I'm not just talking about the cactus and jumbled boulders of Joshua Tree National Park, although they seduce rock climbers by the thousands and helped motivate me to make the 150-mile drive here from Los Angeles. The sheer weirdness of the desert was an attraction too, from the local radio ads for a mail-order "herbal breast enhancement" formula to the horse hitched to a post at the Joshua Tree gas station to the cryptic front yard sign along the highway that read, "ONAN $1,000."
But this trip was driven mostly by curiosity about another novelty: the growing crop of offbeat lodgings in the park-adjacent communities of Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms. This group includes the Mojave Rock Ranch Cabins, a series of four kitschy, two-bedroom "branchito" homes on an isolated mesa; the Villa dei Fiori, a flower-festooned and fastidiously kept house with its own adjacent cave; and Rosebud Ruby Star, an artsy B&B with two rooms, a separate bungalow and resident horse and mule.
That's not to say there's another Palm Springs rising here. Joshua Tree park attendance has been relatively flat since 1994, hovering between 1.1 million and 1.4 million a year. During the hot, slow summer months, traffic is light enough on the park's main road that coyotes can stroll at dusk with impunity. The combined population of Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree, although growing, remains just 25,000 to 30,000. Innkeepers say most visitors to the area are inclined toward spartan hotels or camping.
The new innkeepers are counting on those visitors with a more platonic admiration for the desert: They love it but don't need to sleep with it.
I stayed two nights at the self-catering Villa dei Fiori, spent another night at the Rosebud Ruby Star Bed & Breakfast and inspected the Mojave Rock Ranch Cabins inside and out.
The Mojave Rock cabins, which lie about eight miles from the park's west entrance across a dry lake bed, are the most striking of the bunch. The owners, landscape designers Troy Williams and Gino Dreese, decamped from Los Angeles in 1996 and began with a single rental house, known as the Ranch. They have begun buying, overhauling and renting out neighboring residences in their quiet corner of the desert.
Now their territory covers more than 100 acres and holds four odd rental houses: the Ranch, the Bungalow (opened in 1997), the Homesteader (1998) and the Casita (1999). Each house has two bedrooms, kitchen and one bath, comfortably sleeping two couples or one family.
Each also features a tiny rooftop satellite dish and small TV set. To compensate for the absence of a swimming pool, each cabin's garden includes a "cowboy spa" — an aluminum horse trough about the shape and depth of a bathtub. Pets are forbidden inside, but each house has a dog run.
Rates run $275 to $325 per night, fairly stiff in a territory where houses routinely sell for less than $60,000.
From their rich cactus and succulent gardens to the stamp collections lacquered onto kitchen counters to the California flag doing duty as bedroom drapes, the houses are as full of playful, bold strokes as the windows are full of broad desert vistas. Clearly, the setting appeals to people with a flair for the dramatic: The proprietors say that close to 90 percent of the ranch's guests work in the entertainment industry.
Nestled on a hillside about two minutes' drive from the park's west entrance, the Rosebud Ruby Star Bed & Breakfast is the brainchild of aspiring artist and Ohio transplant Sandy Rosen. It consists of two small guest rooms (with private baths, vivid palettes and their own patio doors) attached to Rosen's Santa Fe-style home. After buying in 1998, Rosen took in her first guests in spring 1999.
There's no pool on the 5-acre lot, but there is the diversion of Rosen's horse and mule, which occupy an enclosure that once was a tennis court. The innkeeper serves a fine breakfast on the patio — coffee, juice, fruit, French toast, bacon and potatoes. Rates run $140 per room per night, double occupancy.
There's also a third choice on the property: the B'iltmore Bunkhouse, a small, free-standing homesteader's cabin with kitchenette ($152 nightly) and a low-ceilinged upstairs sleeping loft that can accommodate two kids or a second couple ($193 takes all).
Villa dei Fiori is Dale Allan Pelton's fittingly elegant name for the three-bedroom, one-bathroom home he keeps in the shadows at the edge of the national park's west end. Pelton, a film industry art director, has been renting out the home for about nine years and just completed an interior redecoration.
It's a gorgeous place, with wine-red and orange walls, original art works, a hefty library of art, design and gardening books, four vine-draped pergolas and a boulder-strewn back yard, with its own fire pit and cave.
Anyone who stays there must abide by Pelton's high standards of tidiness.
On the inside doors of the kitchen cabinets, for example, Polaroid photos model how the dishes should be arranged. And despite rates of $175 to $225 nightly, guests are asked to pack out their own garbage.
Children are allowed at Villa dei Fiori, but I'd argue against bringing them. Even with that boulder cave out back, this house is really a playground for well-behaved grown-ups.
The desert has always harbored a substantial population of creative, rebellious types. Most prominent is the 29 Palms Inn. Its colorful collection of 21 rooms and cottages has huddled on 70 acres around an oasis since 1928. The inn's restaurant, which stands next to a small but enticing swimming pool, has long been the best bet for dinner in the area.
For decades, the inn has been known for its oasis location, the privacy it affords and its jaunty attitude: "We discourage misery and offer alternatives," says the wooden sign by the entrance. There are no phones in the rooms. The televisions are small black-and-whites.
In 1999 the inn added a new unit: Irene's Adobe, a roomy residence that dates to the 1930s and features its own walled-in yard. The priciest of the 19 rooms and two houses on the inn property, Irene's Adobe rents for $210 to $285, depending on the season and day of the week.
Another nearby landmark is the Joshua Tree Inn, a low-key 10-room hotel with pool. Rock musician Gram Parsons died of a drug overdose in 1973 in Room 8, which rents for $65 to $125, depending on the day and season. If you get into the room, notice the collection of guitar picks tucked into one picture frame by previous pilgrims. (Last year, the inn's proprietors also started managing three self-catering rental cottages in Joshua Tree, at rates ranging from $195 to $225 a night.)
The area's other pop music pilgrimage point is the Harmony Motel near Twentynine Palms, a rough-edged budget spot where the rock band U2 stayed while making its "Joshua Tree" album in 1987. The good news there is that rates are $45 a night, double occupancy, with a pool, along with in-room refrigerators and some kitchenettes. But the place has a $45-a-night atmosphere, and the room I inspected, No. 3, still carried a whiff of cigarette smoke.
(If you'd rather have the comfort of a familiar chain name, you'll find a Motel 6 and a Best Western in Twentynine Palms.)
The Roughley Manor Bed and Breakfast Inn is a 1920s stone mansion in Twentynine Palms. By now, the conversion of five upstairs guest rooms into two suites (each with two bedrooms and one bath) should be complete. The suites rent for $125 nightly, the same rate as the four free-standing cottages on the 25-acre property.
If you stuffed $500 in my hands and ordered me to have a great weekend out here, I'd choose the Mojave Rock Ranch (if I had a group along and we wanted to cook for ourselves) or the 29 Palms Inn.
In the same spirit that seems to be motivating hoteliers, several restaurants recently have arrived or revamped themselves.
Among the arrivals is the citified, sophisticated Bella Rouge Bakery and Bistro, which opened in late 1999 in Twentynine Palms. There's also the Crossroads Cafe & Tavern (blue-sky fresco on the ceiling and national park employees frequently among the diners), which opened in January in downtown Joshua Tree.
A few blocks away, there's also the new Jeremy's Beatnik Cafe.