A Fashion & Style-section article highlighted how the Palm Desert, Calif., property, once known primarily for its 18-hole executive golf course, has become “a mecca for worshipers of high design”—and in particular architect John Elgin Woolf, who created Marrakesh’s pink-and-white villas and pool houses in his signature “Hollywood Regency” style that is now enjoying a resurgence in popularity. “The desert used to be driven by golf,” one Marrakesh resident told the Times. “Now the big engine of the economy [here] is style.”
A recent feature in The New York Times Fashion & Style section highlighted the revival of Marrakesh Country Club in Palm Desert, Calif., due to its renewed appeal as the centerpiece of a community now known for its contemporary architecture, design and style.
For 45 years, give or take, the Times noted, the main draw of the private residential community, which sits in the bowl formed by the San Jacinto Mountains and the Santa Rosa Mountains, was its 18-hole executive golf course. But these days, the Times said, Marrakesh CC is “as much a mecca for worshipers of high design as it is a destination for those who pray for eagles and birdies.”
The “god” of those now drawn to Marrakesh is architect John Elgin Woolf, who created the property’s 364 pink-and-white villas and 14 pink-and-white pool houses in his signature Hollywood Regency style.
“The desert used to be driven by golf,” Stephen Drucker, the former editor of several lifestyle publications and the owner of a Marrakesh villa, told the Times. “Now the big engine of the economy in the desert, [and] certainly Palm Springs, is style. You can’t buy architecture of this quality, at this price, in Palm Springs.”
The Times feature began with this description of “Jingle Mingle Night” at Marrakesh CC:
“Inside its serpentine pink walls, past the entry gazebo’s cone roof, up the drive flanked by petunia beds and olive trees clipped like standard poodles, a line of cars disgorged guests swathed in Santa suits and stocking caps and sweaters with blinking LED lights.
“Inside the clubhouse, waiters in red and green argyle took drink orders, and a couple dozen couples of a certain age grooved to Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music.” But note the table by the dance floor, the one filled with [relatively] young men in sober [by comparison] dark blazers. If their youth and their attire weren’t conspicuous enough, there was the matter of their conversation.
“Sawing into a slab of prime rib, Stephen Drucker, the former editor of several lifestyle publications, announced that he had just spruced up the portico of his Marrakesh villa with a pair of white canvas drapes — an Old Hollywood touch, he said, that reminded him of ‘those birthday parties where ‘Uncle’ Gary Cooper would take little Christina Crawford for a pony ride.’”
Steven Price, described as “an architecture historian who wears his silver hair in a bob,” told the Times that the changes described by Drucker represented “exactly the kind of thing I’m excited the committee is making provisions for,” referring to the club’s Architecture and Landscape Committee.
Others who have been drawn by the appeal of Marrakesh’s mansard roofs and pink stucco walls, the Times reported, include home furnishings magnate Annie Selke, New York designer Joe D’Urso, Los Angeles designer and architect Tim Morrison, and Susie Coelho, a former HGTV host and a former wife of Sonny Bono, who before being elected to Congress served as mayor of Palm Springs, Calif.
In 1967, the Times reported, when Bono was still married to Cher, an amateur golfer and golf course architect named Johnny Dawson, who also developed Thunderbird Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif. and Eldorado Country Club in Indian Wells, Calif., leased 155 acres in Palm Desert. Inspired by the property’s similarities to the Atlas Mountains-ringed city of Marrakesh, Dawson conceived of a new club with a Moroccan theme. The community’s salmon-pink palette was suggested by the rosy sandstone walls, and its hilltop clubhouse, introduced by a Middle Eastern-style water stair, was placed to overlook the villasm, like a casbah surveying so many riads.
After that, the Times reported, “the Moroccan trope kind of trails off,” because John Woolf, hired to design the club in 1968, “had a vernacular all his own.”
Woolf had come to Los Angeles from Atlanta to become an actor, hoping his Southern roots would help land him a role in “Gone With the Wind,” the Times reported. But he had also studied architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and when the acting career fizzled, he leveraged his Hollywood ties to become an architect to the stars.
Eventually known as “Hollywood Regency,” Woolf’s trademark architectural style “blended English Regency and French Regency with movie-set glamour and modernist restraint,” the Times reported. His houses offered elegant scale and symmetry, dramatic entrances (often a pair of tall Pullman doors puncturing a mansard roof) and perfectly proportioned rooms punctuated by neoclassical columns and elliptical windows. This muted opulence, the Times noted, appealed to Hollywood nobility like Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.
In recent years, the Times added, Woolf’s reputation has seen a resurgence, after producer Robert Evans’s book “The Kid Stays in the Picture” (and the film based on it) and a biography and a play about the Hollywood agent Sue Mengers brought attention to their Woolf-designed lairs in Beverly Hills, Calif. A Vanity Fair profile of Woolf also shed light on his unorthodox personal life and “Woolf Pack” contingent of partners and associates.
In the Los Angeles real-estate market, Woolf houses are considered trophies, the Times reported. Recent owners of the designer’s homes include producer John Goldwyn, hotelier Jeff Klein; designer Nate Berkus and nightlife impresario Sean MacPherson. Last fall, Jill Tavelman Collins (the former wife of Phil Collins, and mother of Lilly) bought a Woolf house in Beverly Hills for $12.5 million, 40 percent over the asking price.
The one-, two- and three-bedroom duplex villas at Marrakesh, while more modest in both scale and price—units can still be had for under $400,000—do not stint on Woolfian drama, the Times reported. They all have deep courtyards, tiered mansard roofs and tall, skinny front doors that make anyone passing through them “feel like Loretta Young [who had a Woolf house].” Inside there are 10-foot ceilings, closets the size of bedrooms, and airy atriums off the master baths.
Originally marketed to the local gentry, and specifically, members of the Los Angeles Country Club, as well as snowbirds from Canada and Chicago, Marrakesh memberships offered “a slice of the good life, early-1970s-style,” the Times reported.
The Times article include a description of “a bougainvillea-draped condo between the eighth green and the ninth tee [that] has remained virtually untouched since it was first decorated over four decades ago..”
Until recently, the Times reported, Marrakesh CC leased the property it sits on from a private owner. But in fall 2015, it bought the land. Since then, property values have surged, as have the ambitions of local remodelers. Marrakesh residents have lately been erecting high hedges against their neighbors, the Times reported, installing swimming pools in their courtyards and turning their atriums into outdoor showers. “
And like most small communities, the Times added, Marrakesh is not immune to controversy. Usually the disputes involve aesthetics, but there is also “golf course chatter about ‘too many Modernism Week activities’ or ‘the Palm Springs problem’ ” that some residents told the Times is “code for too many gays.”
But such tensions are the exception “in this pink Brigadoon,” the Times added, noting that “it’s hard to walk or drive down Kasbah Drive or Minzah Way without being waved at, repeatedly.”
“The common pull of the design makes everybody mix well,” Daniel Nelms, a single father of two young boys who moved to Marrakesh from Los Angeles a year and a half ago, told the Times. “One of my sons spent all spring in the pool playing Barbies with our 70-year-old neighbor. I wish I’d had that growing up.”
Added Price, the architectural historian: “Marrakesh self-selects. How seriously can you take yourself when you live in a pink house?”
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