This week’s dream: Hollywood’s postwar playground

Palm Springs embodies the American dream, says Nigel Tisdall in the Daily Telegraph. The Californian desert resort was the favourite playground of Hollywood in the decades after WWII: Frank Sinatra built a house, Elvis honeymooned and Marilyn Monroe hid away from her fans here. It is the perfect product of that "bright new era of air conditioning and dream-sized auto-mobiles", an "unreal" city of tidy streets, manicured lawns and superb "mid-century modernist" archi-tecture. These days it attracts wealthy retirees and a lot of tourists, but the stars keep coming, too, and the place still feels "miraculous" – so small, yet so "full of pleasurable things".

The city lies amid the mountains of the Colorado Desert, just one of eight resort towns in the Coachella Valley, 110 miles east of LA. The 115 golf courses, 40,000 swimming pools and constant sunshine attract so many visitors in winter that the population almost doubles. For "most Europeans", however, the architecture is the main draw. From 1945 until the mid-1960s, "lauded archi-tects such as Albert Frey, William F. Cody and Richard Neutra" designed some of their best houses and civic buildings here, "low-roofed, open-plan buildings with strong lines and floor-to-ceiling glass" affording pano-ramic views of "the richly hued desert landscape".

The resort's social life centres on its "high-design luxury hotels", among which the Parker Palm Springs leads the way, boasting "cosy gardens with fire-pits and pampas grass". But visitors should not miss the natural wonders surround-ing the town. Just above it is the Mount San Jacinto State Park, a "lofty sanctuary that offers 54 miles of hiking trails in Alpine scenery", its woods a refreshing escape from the desert heat below. Looking down across the valley, it's "hard not to feel, as Ol' Blue Eyes sang, as though 'I've got the world on a string, sittin' on a rainbow…'"

Air New Zealand (0800 028 4149) flies to LA from £351. Allow three hours for the drive to Palm Springs; SuperShuttle (001 800 258 3826) offers transfers. ·