Heat and architecture lure Canadians to Palm Springs

A short three-hour flight from Vancouver, it’s possible to walk off the plane and glide into vacation mode within minutes – poolside, under the palm trees, surrounded by cactuses, citrus and olive trees, with desert mountains as a backdrop, and enveloped in the popular luxury design movement of the 1950s, a.k.a. Populuxe. It’s as if the past seven decades never happened.

The B.C. connection with Palm Springs, Calif., is a long-standing one, especially for those who took advantage of the plunge in real estate prices during the economic downturn of 2008 and 2009. But Palm Springs had gone through a depressed time before the downturn, and the survival of its large stock of one-level mid-century modern houses was largely a matter of disregard rather than any kind of preservation policy, says Vancouver’s former co-director of planning Larry Beasley, who’s owned a mid-century modern home here since 2011.