The Dong people sing love songs, drinking songs, and work songs; “gate-barring songs” to greet visitors while assessing their intentions; and Grand Songs, epic historical ballads passed down orally from song masters to young disciples. In other respects as well, the people of Dimen, one of 15 Dong villages in Guizhou province, still practice a way of life that dates back to the 13th century. They build their houses and bridges with wooden pegs and posts. They use ancient, integrated farming methods, raising rice and carp together in thousands of terraced ponds cut into the mountainside. The women weave and dye their own cloth, including a glossy black fabric they buff with boiled cow skin and egg whites.

But Dimen isn’t completely stopped in time. Its tiny commercial center consists of a bus station, an elementary school, a grocery store—and a cell phone shop. And even though Guizhou is one of the poorest provinces in China, televisions, washing machines, and other trappings of modern life increasingly crop up in Dong households, largely because the government offers subsidies on surplus consumer goods.

China is rocketing into the future—lacing itself up with superhighways, swallowing rural towns, and spitting out gleaming cities. In Dimen, nearly half of the village’s 2,340 residents work in nearby towns and cities, forgoing the rice fields for better-paying jobs in construction and manufacturing. But in the past decade, privately administered conservation projects have encouraged the people of Dimen to reestablish a self-sustaining local economy and, even while engaging with the outside world, preserve many of their traditional ways. The Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop, founded by Hong Kong professor and entrepreneur Wai Kit Lee, strives to bolster indigenous Dong culture without turning Dimen into a tourist trap that puts villagers on display.

The Research Workshop collaborated with residents to rebuild the Dimen drum tower, which burned down in 2006. The restoration of this symbol of village unity set the precedent of a rural community empowered to safeguard its heritage.

One of the Grand Songs of the Dong, which takes more than an hour to sing, is titled “Village Elder Tang Gong.” According to local legend, Tang founded Dimen 800 years ago. This traditional red pagoda was built as a memorial to him and restored in the 1980s.

The Dong people of Dimen live much the way their ancestors did. But a few modern amenities have appeared in recent years, as in the home of Niangqian Wu and her husband, a rice farmer and carpenter who helped construct the Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop. They live in a house built into a hillside, its front half hanging precariously over the slope. In the living room, which is heated by a coal fire, the ceiling is low and the thin wooden walls are plastered with peeling sheets of newspaper. Asked how her life has changed over the past decade, Wu nods in the direction of the single bare lightbulb overhead. “Better wiring, piped water, better roads,” she says through a translator. “Fire hydrants.” Indoor plumbing is now standard.

A glossy white refrigerator sits in the corner of the room. It is empty, its interior still coated with protective plastic film and the manufacturer’s labels. In the dim light it glows like an alien. “She says the fridge is for decoration, to make them look like a modern family,” the translator says. “On TV, they see that city people have refrigerators. But she says her family has no use for it. When it is time to eat, they kill chickens. They catch fish. They pick vegetables from their garden.” Wu giggles, covering her mouth. “She thinks it’s very funny,” explains the translator, “that the fridge is empty.”

Distinguished by its stone arches and tiered tiled roofs, a covered “flower bridge” is an architectural highlight of most Dong villages. It provides shelter from the rain and a year- round place to rest, socialize, and play games.

A narrow pebbly river bisects Dimen’s dense patchwork of wooden houses. Spanning the water stand five exuberantly ornamented “flower bridges,” also known as “wind-and-rain bridges” for their utility in a storm. Just outside the village, terraced rice paddies and fields of vegetables and tea plants provide residents with their main livelihood and sources of food.

In the spring of 2010, Wai Kit Lee and fellow researcher Leon Ren helped launch an experimental pilot project, inspired by the Community Supported Agriculture movement. They paired approximately 150 rice-farming families in Dimen with families in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen. The city dwellers pay the farmers directly, and fairly, for their organic rice. The hope, Ren explains, is to foster personal connections and spark “interactive tourism and cultural exchange.” He envisions urban families visting Dimen to see where their rice comes from, getting to know the farmers, and learning more about ethnic-minority culture and rural life.

SIDEBAR: Lifestyles in the Balance

In 2003, Wai Kit Lee arrived in Guizhou with a team of musicologists. A Hong Kong businessman, publisher, and professor of ethnic-minority culture at universities in Beijing and Guiyang, Lee planned to record the music of the Dong, Miao, Yao, and Shui people and release it on a series of CDs. But when he witnessed the penetration of commercial activities in the region and saw villagers leaving their homes to work in nearby factories and cities, he took on a considerably larger project. With his own money, he funded the Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop, which opened on the eastern outskirts of Dimen in 2005. Its goals include the documentation of ethnic music, crafts, and rituals, and the development of locally controlled economic projects that improve the quality of life without throwing the culture out of balance.

Resembling a rambling wooden tree house, the workshop’s complex was built using traditional Dong techniques, without a formal blueprint or a single nail. The village feng shui master sacrificed a chicken to ensure that construction proceeded smoothly. Gently rising staircases connect the center to the lodge, which accommodates up to 60 visiting scholars and researchers.

The research center aims to reverse a trend that has taken hold in rural China: Business interests lease entire century-old villages and turn them into ethnic-minority “theme parks.” They charge admission fees for daily shows of formerly sacred rituals. Villagers get paid nominal amounts to perform them and to host tourists in their “traditional-looking” homes. “They use heritage to develop a brand and incite tourism, to attract eyeballs and money,” says Lee. “People who go to those theme parks are curious about ‘exotic’ lifestyles, but they do not visit them with the intention to understand more about the culture.” Guesthouses and souvenir shops might thrive, but eventually, he says, “the soul of the town is gone, only the skeleton remains.”

“We’re trying to find opportunities for the Dong to improve their livelihood without completely altering their way of life,” Lee explains. “I want to show that a village can be rich in other ways—in community, in self-reliance, in lack of anxiety.”

For more images of Dimen, see here.

The Olympics bore the brunt of the bad rap, but in truth, Beijing’s historic city center has been at risk for far longer. Mao Zedong, who began his reign as leader of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, declared, “Forests of factory chimneys should mushroom in Beijing.” In 1958, the municipal government developed a master plan to demolish the old city within ten years. Buoyed by China’s booming economy, real estate developers in the past two decades have been finishing the job Mao started.The government doesn’t have a consistent preservation policy, and historic buildings continue to disappear at an alarming rate. In the 1950s, there were a reported 3,600 hutongs, narrow alleys with joined courtyard houses on either side; in 2008, there were 1,000.

Concurrently, however, a nascent preservation movement has taken hold, stoked by individuals, journalists, and bloggers who document the city’s changes in photographs and forums and fight to save heritage buildings from the wrecking ball. One guiding force is Jun Wang, a Beijing-based journalist whose Mandarin-language blog, City-Eyes, and 2003 book, Beijing Record, helped raise awareness about the importance of preservation and urban planning in China. “The most important things are raising awareness and increasing community participation,” he says. “Many people in China think ‘city planning’ means ‘demolition.’”

There have been some victories. In 2002, the city designated 33 areas as “historical preservation areas,” limiting further development. In 2005, the Central Government of China approved a master plan that preserves the old city as a whole, but implementation of the policy has been inconsistent. Earlier this year, after persistent lobbying by Wang and the BCHPC, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage declared the house of the late urban planner Liang Sicheng—a central figure in Wang’s book—an “immovable cultural heritage,” reversing a demolition order.

But protection can be a tenuous thing in China, where the government’s right to eminent domain overrides all. Two years ago, setting a groundbreaking precedent, a courtyard house owner filed a lawsuit against the district government and won, resisting eviction. The house still stands, in a densely populated area surrounded by a gnarly knot of traffic. The government is weighing whether to widen the road; if it does, the house, protected or not, will be demolished.

The brainchild of Austin-based hotelier Liz Lambert, El Cosmico is a new kind of lodging: part trailer park, part creative commune—“a Trans-Pecos kibbutz for the 21st century,” as the website would have it. (The place will exchange free boarding for labor, if you want to try your hand at building a stone wall, for instance.) Located in a scrubby 18-acre field in Marfa—the remote, single-stoplight town that has become a major art mecca in recent years because of its affiliation with the late minimalist artist and furniture maker Donald Judd—El Cosmico features “guest rooms” in the form of five renovated vintage trailers rescued by Lambert with the help of her “trailer guy” and a Yahoo group for Spartan owners and enthusiasts. Completing this modern take on KOA are five yurts with bamboo floors, one teepee, and 24 camping spots. Also on site is an open-air kitchen, a grove of Chinese elm trees strung with hammocks, and a smattering of wood-fired Dutch hot tubs that resemble Alice in Wonderland teacups.

Lambert, who grew up in West Texas and lives part-time on a ranch just outside Marfa, envisions El Cosmico as a place for locals as well as visitors. It will function as an inclusive “artistic playground” that fosters a sense of community and creativity, where people can take pottery and printmaking classes in soon-to-be-built art shacks and gather for songwriting workshops and yoga retreats.

At the heart of the experience are the trailers, which date from the ’40s and ’50s and start at just $75 a night. Though small (none are bigger than 323 square feet), the interiors resemble the cabins on a ship with tons of creative storage and no space wasted. And because they’re clad entirely in birch veneer freshly coated in marine varnish, they shine brilliantly at night, especially when candles are lit. “I think of them as land yachts,” Lambert says. “The surrounding desert is like the sea—in fact, this whole part of Texas was once under water—and these trailers are like little ships.”

Whenever Lambert stays in the trailers (she favors the Branstrator for its claw-foot bathtub on the front porch), she sleeps with the doors and windows open so she can smell the dusty sagebrush and hear the coyotes howling and the trains passing by. “There’s a sense of being cocooned and protected, but you’re still connected to the outdoors,” she says. “When I get out of bed, I’m two steps from the front door. I love the immediacy of the experience.”

Hwy. 67 and Madrid St., Marfa, Texas; 432.729.1950; elcosmico.com; campsites $20; yurts $50; trailers $75-$125 per night.

10 Things a Trailer Can Teach You

Think Like a Ship
In boat construction, every nook and cranny is utilized and objects often play more than one role. In El Cosmico’s Imperial Mansion, a stool made of recycled tires doubles as a coffee table. In another trailer, a bathroom door becomes a bedroom door with a swing of the hinge.

Reconsider the Basics
Free up precious square footage by deciding what you can do without. Maybe you don’t need a couch if you have a big bed? If you never bake, can you forgo an oven?

Break Out of the Box
A deck or patio can act as an open-air living room, doubling your space. To make an appealing hangout, install a fire pit, a grill, weatherproof furniture—and even an outdoor shower or bathtub.

Make Like a Minimalist
Keeping interiors simple and spare, with little excess ornamentation, increases a sense of spaciousness. All-white interiors or floor-to-ceiling wood paneling creates a neutral backdrop and allows well-placed bits of color to really pop.

Sneak Peeks
Generous windows in tight quarters can ease a sense of claustrophobia and emphasize a connection to the outdoors. If you have the ability to design or add windows, place them in unusual spots (at bed height, for example) to create postcard views that offer new perspectives on the landscape.

Embrace Cozy
A small space can be cave-like in a good way. Enhance the coziness with a plethora of candles and a woolly throw blanket and enjoy intimate corners for conversation.

Master Division
Instead of dividing up a long, narrow space with walls—blocking sightlines and making things feel uncomfortably closed-in—imply different zones with transparent screens, such as a beaded curtain or an open bookshelf. Do you really need privacy when it’s just you, or the two of you?

Cut Clutter
Embracing certain practical rituals, like taking off your shoes before entering or putting something away as soon as you use it, helps keep things clutter-free. This is essential in a small space, where it doesn’t take much to make a mess.

Beautify Essentials
A tiny space puts an end to the hoarding of stuff (ideally), so why not make what you do have extra beautiful? Splurge on a few key pieces and pay attention to the mundane objects: a gorgeous broom makes housekeeping a little bit happier.

Personality Test
Sharing 280 square feet offers a crash course in tolerance and compatibility and a chance to get to know your sweetheart—or yourself—a lot better. “It strips things down,” says Lambert. “We get so busy and cluttered in our lives. Spending time in a trailer offers a reckoning: It helps you reassess what your needs actually are and to figure out what’s really important to you.”

Today, the neighborhood has a new beacon: Mint Plaza, an L-shaped pedestrian plaza filling the footprint of the once-neglected alley. Hugging the Old Mint’s north and west-facing façades, the 18,000-square foot plaza provides much-needed public space in an inner-city neighborhood that sorely lacks it otherwise. The sandwich shop and SRO hotel are still there, but they now share plaza frontage with popular restaurants, cafes, and newly renovated live-work lofts and office spaces. The project was spearheaded and funded by a local developer, Martin Building Company, who owns five buildings abutting the publicly owned plaza.

Mint Plaza was designed by CMG Landscape Architecture, a San Francisco firm founded in 2000 that has quickly become integral in shaping all scales of the public realm in the Bay Area. Early on with Mint Plaza, the CMG design team held a series of public workshops to gather community input, as well as engender sustained neighborhood ownership of the new project. Although San Franciscans are better known for contention than consensus, what emerged from those meetings was a desire among residents, workers, and business owners for “a space that was flexible and could function in lots of different ways,” says Scott Cataffa, who served as project manager.  “They wanted farmer’s markets, outdoor concerts, dance lessons, sculpture.” To encourage this civic vitality, Martin Building Company helped found a nonprofit organization, Friends of Mint Plaza, which will program and maintain the plaza in perpetuity.

The designers envisioned a democratic zone that welcomed everyone, with wall-to-wall paving, active edges, and an open plan whose character was defined by its users rather than by form or style.  Such accessibility was critical, the designers felt, to balance some of the gentrifying economic forces inherent to the project.  Willett Moss, the principal on the project, describes the approach as “thick urbanism”: integrative, inclusive design that fosters a richer, more diverse urban ecology.

The resulting design is as humane as it as iconic. Warm gray terrazzo-style concrete pavers provide a neutral backdrop for plaza activity. A statuesque native oak tree anchors the plaza’s eastern entrance. A grove of ginkgos at the western end creates an inviting place to gather, their lime green foliage seducing passersby from a distance. But the brightest jolt of color—and the clearest expression of the plaza’s accessibility and flexibility—comes from the one hundred orange chairs scattered about, allowing visitors to shape their own experience, whether gathering with a group of friends, or finding a solitary spot in the sun or shade.

The plaza’s field of paving subtly shifts and tilts, suggesting rather than defining zones for dining, performance, and passage. The articulated planes also serve a critical role in the Plaza’s stormwater management systems.  Like many older cities, San Francisco is served by an aging sewer system that combines both storm and sanitary flows.  During large storm events, the flow exceeds treatment plant capacity and untreated effluent is discharged into San Francisco Bay.  By retaining and infiltrating flows on site—up to a 100-year storm event—the Plaza design serves as a prototype for a distributed, city-wide solution to stormwater management and treatment. The planar grading directs storm-water into either rain gardens planted with native reeds, which filter first-flush pollutants before allowing the water to percolate through the sandy soil, or into discreet slot drains that lead to a sub-grade infiltration basin.  The infiltration basin employs a purposely low-tech system based on sanitary leech field technologies to achieve a low cost, easily replicated model for stormwater management in dense urban environments.

A steel arbor runs along the north side of the plaza, entwined with flowering trumpet vines that bring green into the heart of the plaza without taking up much space or light. The arbor’s strong sculptural form establishes a distinct identity for the urban landscape.  It also drops the scale of the buildings and structures the otherwise largely open space, funneling pedestrians through in the mornings, and sheltering café tables in the afternoons and evenings, when the ground-floor bistro is open. At night, three 40-foot tall mast lights throw dramatic pools of light onto the concrete pavers, transforming the plaza with a playful effect.

The opportunity to walk or sit beneath the arbor, to pass through pockets of light and dark, and to arrange the chairs to one’s liking, creates an endless variety of experience for the visitor—a feature of landscape architecture that Moss thinks is too frequently dismissed or overlooked.  “A visitor’s sensory encounter in a space is a critical function of design,” says Moss.  “In order for a public space to be meaningful, it has to be memorable. Novelty and variety and a sense of physical engagement—how your body understands a space—are what embeds a place in your memory, and makes you want to return.”

As an urban stage, the new square attracts a vibrant and diverse cast—and plenty of repeat visitors. This project offers proof that with the right mix of pragmatism, invention, and community investment any derelict urban space can become a catalyst for future growth, and a model for smart development.  Mint Plaza’s flexible design ensures it will stay relevant to this community, even as their neighborhood continues to evolve.

If you close your eyes and block out the visual cues — the red ocher 18th-century buildings, the brightly colored bazaars, the monkeys scrambling maniacally over the dusty rooflines — you would still know you were in Jaipur, India. The country’s center of traditional craftsmanship has a distinctive soundtrack: from one corner of the old city come the sounds of the braziers, pounding brass disks into wide-mouth bowls; from another, a cacophony of hammers, as hundreds of men beat tiny squares of silver until they ease and spread into airy silver leaf. Over there is the metallic chipping of the marble workers, carving busts of Gandhi and Hindu goddesses in their turquoise-painted workshops. And in the distance, the sandpapery ch-ch-ch of the city’s gem polishers, who sit cross-legged at their grinders shaping precious stones for Cartier.

Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan in northwestern India, has always been a magnet for artisans. Founded in 1727 by the king Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, a mathematician and astronomer well versed in principles of architecture and civil engineering, it was the country’s benchmark for urban planning. In an effort to establish a vibrant economy and to secure bragging rights as India’s most exquisite court, Sawai Jai Singh invited the country’s top craftsmen and merchants to set up shop within the walls of his new city, offering perks like free land and guaranteed royal patronage. A grid of streets and wide, straight avenues divided the city into distinct quarters, each dedicated to a different skill, from tent making to enameling to tie-and-dye.

‘‘Sawai Jai Singh was a man of great foresight,’’ the jeweler Munnu Kasliwal told me when I visited him at the Gem Palace, the boutique that’s been in his family since 1852. As we talked, he sat in a pile of hot-pink pillows and fondled a necklace dripping with emeralds and rare rose-cut diamonds. (The style is ‘‘very popular in Aspen,’’ he confided.) Kasliwal’s ancestors, court jewelers to India’s royal families and Mughal emperors, were among those recruited at the city’s inception. Now he plies his trade just off a street where cows and hairy pigs snuffle through piles of trash — a very different scene from the Jaipur he remembers as a boy. ‘‘There were a little over 100 cars and probably about 500 scooters,’’ he said. ‘‘There was no pollution, no traffic, nothing around but farmland and beautiful private gardens.’’

Today, Jaipur has burst at the seams. Designed for 50,000 residents in 1727, the greater city is now home to 3.1 million, with the population growing an average of 4.5 percent every year. The neatly gridded streets of the old city are perpetually snarled in traffic of every imaginable conveyance — scooter, taxi, rickshaw, elephant — and outside the ancient walls sprawls a 565-square-mile modern city that swallows its rural surroundings whole.

After independence in 1947, the power and wealth of the royal courts quickly dissipated, the patronage system died out, and many formerly titled families, their fortunes much diminished, eventually turned their palaces and haveli mansions into hotels. Nowadays the stoneworkers whose forefathers carved columns for Rajasthan’s famously ornate palaces and the musicians who played at the royal court are struggling, with few exceptions, to eke out a living. The younger generation, swept up in India’s heady economic growth, has moved on to more lucrative and less labor-intensive work.

One of the people most concerned with the loss of traditional artisans in modern Jaipur is Faith Singh, a pink-cheeked Briton with a shock of bright white hair who moved to Jaipur in 1967. When she arrived, hand-block printing was on the decline, with machine-printed fabrics flooding the markets. Demand for handiwork was disappearing, and hand-block printers were mired in debt to cloth merchants. In 1971, driven by her own interest in textiles and fashion, Singh and her Jaipur-born husband, John, started Anokhi, a clothing and housewares label dedicated to fair wages, good work conditions and new ideas for a centuries-old industry. They broke with tradition in bold ways: they hired women (wage earners at the time were predominantly male), scaled and colored prints in a contemporary way and, perhaps most important, provided the printers with fabric, releasing them from their greatest financial burden. The label’s success jump-started the revival of the hand-block printing industry — one of the rare examples to date of a dying art yanked back from the brink of extinction. Now run by Singh’s son, Pritam, and his wife, Rachel, Anokhi does a brisk business in stylish, hand-printed garments and bed linens and provides steady employment for more than a thousand people.

Singh’s mission to keep Rajasthan’s cultural heritage alive has particular urgency in a state where the government means well — for example, it pays folk artists to perform in state-sponsored festivals and hires stoneworkers for conservation projects — but can’t fill the void left by the collapse of the patronage system. It has bigger things to deal with, such as the frequent and devastating droughts. ‘‘Who is going to nourish these artisans?’’ Singh said over lunch at Anokhi Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant her son opened in 2006. ‘‘The greatest challenge is that India inherited a system designed to rule rather than enable. We’ve got all this fermenting democracy, but we’ve still got a mind-set conditioned by centuries of feudalism. The prevailing attitude is: the state should provide.’’

The concept of public-private partnerships may be relatively new in India, but Faith and John have managed to create the Jaipur Virasat Foundation in conjunction with Rajasthan civic leaders. Besides leading weekly heritage walks through the back alleys of the old city, the group runs a community space that doubles as an art gallery and lecture hall. It also organizes a wide range of music, literature and cultural festivals, from small gatherings in rural villages to large-scale events like the new Rajasthan International Folk Festival. Held every October in the nearby city of Jodhpur, it has stoked global interest in Rajasthani folk music. (Mick Jagger is a patron.)

Now, as similar initiatives are taking hold throughout the region, Jaipur’s traditional arts, crafts and music have started to hum with a new vitality. In the fabric-dyeing district, I followed a stream of bright orange water to the tie-and-dye workshop of Mohammed Sabir, a potbellied man in a checkered sarong. His family has been in this business for 140 years, he told me, and though the work is painstaking and slow, he’s determined not to let their craft die. In recent years, he’s begun developing custom fabrics for top Indian designers like Rina Dhaka. ‘‘I want to take it forward, make it more contemporary,’’ he told me, hoisting into my lap armfuls of his signature striped, multihued silks.

Another day I visited the textile designer Raj Kanwar, who is using old techniques to modern effect at her workshop on the outskirts of Jaipur. A former professor at a state-run art college, Kanwar applies tie-and-dye, brass-block printing and gold embellishment to garments and invents designs based on classical Indian architectural elements: a flourish from a jali lattice window, for example, or a pattern from a floor tile. ‘‘Citizens have long had an attitude of ‘let go.’ We’ve become very dependent on the government helping everything,’’ she said. ‘‘But I felt it was people like me who have to improve things.’’ Behind her, half a dozen printers stood working at their padded tables, positioning brass blocks above silk stretched taut and then bringing their fists down with an authoritative thump.

Ayush and Geetanjali Kasliwal are also hoping to ignite an entrepreneurial spark with their company, Ayush Kasliwal Furniture Design. The husband-and-wife design team commissions pieces that put more than 1,000 artisans throughout Rajasthan to work. At their shop, Anantaya, Ayush showed me one such design, a wrapped-wire coffee table made in a remote village once known for its iron bird cages. ‘‘Being a wire worker is no longer a sustainable livelihood,’’ he explained. ‘‘Bird cages are not really in much demand anymore.’’ Ayush gave his drawings to the ironworkers with no constraints on their use; he ordered some products for his shop but also encouraged them to make and sell the items directly for their own profit. ‘‘When there is a potential skill base of hundreds of craftsmen, and at the same time it is impossible for us to support them all, why not? Very often that is all these communities need — a little impetus.’’

Later, I went with Singh to visit Anokhi’s central workshop, set among blooming frangipani and jacaranda trees. ‘‘Advertising makes people think that having Nescafé and light skin and high-rises and wearing short skirts are signs of being modern,’’ Singh said. ‘‘But in a society like ours, culture is an integral part of development.’’ Glancing anxiously at her watch, she shepherded me to a spot near the main exit so I could witness firsthand the moment that still elated her, after all these years: the daily exodus of workers going back to their lives. Sure enough, at 6 o’clock a bell tolled and almost instantaneously a pixelated, shimmering stream of women in bright saris burst forth, chattering and gleeful, accompanied by a chorus of tinkling ankle bracelets. ‘‘This is it — look at this!’’ Singh exclaimed as they disappeared down the lane on foot, scooter and motorbike. ‘‘They’re how they are, and how they were,’’ she murmured appreciatively. Within five minutes, they were gone, nothing but gauzy dust in their wake.

Essentials Jaipur, India

GETTING AROUND It’s best to hire a car and driver; V Care Tours & Travels is one reputable company (011-91-141-400-1853; carhireinrajasthan.com; about $22 per day). You can also schedule a heritage walking tour with Jaipur Virasat Foundation (by appointment only; 011-91-141-222-2140; $4 per person).

HOTELS Nana Ki Haveli Cozy bed-and-breakfast with 15 stylish rooms and delicious home-cooked dinners (an additional $7). Fateh Tiba, Moti Dongri Road; 011-91-141-261-5502; nanakihaveli.com; doubles from $44. Rambagh Palace Seventy-nine luxurious rooms in a fairy-tale Mughal palace, once home to the Maharajah of Jaipur. Bhawani Singh Road; 011-91-141-221-1919; tajhotels.com; doubles from $572. Samode Haveli Ornate 19th-century manor house, managed by the nobles of Samode, with 30 marble-floored rooms. Gangapole; 011-91-141-263-2407; samode.com; doubles from $153.

SHOPS AND MARKETS Anantaya Modern lighting and furniture made by traditional artisans throughout Rajasthan. B-6/A-1, Prithviraj Road, C-Scheme; 011-91-141-236-4863. Anokhi Woodblock-printed clothing and housewares, with a vegetarian cafe next door. (Anokhi’s hand-printing museum, in a 16th-century haveli in nearby Amber, is also worth a visit.) 2nd Floor, KK Square, C-11 Prithviraj Road, C-Scheme; 011-91-141-400-7244; anokhi.com. Bapu Bazaar One of many colorful markets in the old city, just west of Sanganeri Gate, with a good selection of textiles and jootis (pointy-toed leather shoes). The Gem Palace Exquisite jewelry and stones from the eighth-generation jeweler Munnu Kasliwal, whose clients include both Indian and Hollywood royalty. Mirza Ismail Road; 011-91-141-237-4175; gempalacejaipur.com. Ojjas Here you can buy Raj Kanwar’s gorgeous block-printed, hand-loomed silk and cotton saris, shawls and linens. 663 Hanuman Nagar Extension, Khatipura; 011-91-141-224-6916; ojjas.org.

As the pace of change quickens in Bhutan, so do efforts to preserve its centuries-old Buddhist art. Jaime Gross heads into the Himalayas to report.

Driving Bhutan’s single highway, a serpentine road hacked precariously into the side of a mountain and perpetually under repair, is an exercise in nerve. It averages 20 curves per mile, and requires honking before every one to warn the overloaded trucks and grazing cows that lurk around each bend.

More than 70 percent of this tiny Buddhist kingdom is forested, and outside our car window scrolled every possible shade of green: emerald rice paddies, thick jungles of wild marijuana, silver fir trees draped in moss, and misty, wooded hills laced with prayer flags and crowned with fortified monasteries, or dzongs. The local radio station provided the sound track, a strange mix that included a traditional Bhutanese folk song, a reading of the daily national astrology report, and Nelly Furtado’s club hit “Promiscuous.” Farther along the road, in even more-remote areas of this already remote country, we’d encounter ruby-robed monks wearing ubiquitous white iPod earbuds—signs of the kingdom’s recent foray into the globalized world.

I was heading out on a weeklong journey through the monasteries of far eastern Bhutan with Eddie Jose, a conservator of Asian paintings for the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and Tsewang Nidup, our guide. Jose was on a mission to find ancient thangkas—sacred scroll paintings used in Buddhist rituals and meditation—in need of repair. The trip was part of an ambitious five-year project helmed by the Honolulu Academy of Arts, which has spent nearly $2 million assembling “The Dragon’s Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan,” the first international show focusing exclusively on Bhutanese sacred art and dance—and the first time many of these works have ever left their homeland. The exhibition will travel to New York’s Rubin Museum of Art in September and includes 65 thangkas restored by Jose and his students.

Rendered in mineral pigments using hair-thin brushes, these richly symbolic, intricate paintings depict Buddhist deities and scenes of religious instruction. Their beauty, believed to be a manifestation of the divine, is said to offer viewers protection, healing, and enlightenment. Their existence, meanwhile, represents to scholars of both religion and art a compelling (and as yet unstudied) history of 1,300 years of Tantric Buddhism. And for a conservator like Jose, they embody a number of technical challenges: many of these scrolls are filled with holes from gnawing rats and insects, damaged by smoke from temple lamps, and creased and torn from centuries of rolling and unrolling.

We were traveling almost as far east as the road would take us—nearly to India—because Guru Rinpoche, the Buddha reincarnate who in the eighth century brought Buddhism to Bhutan, passed through the region on his second missionary trip. Jose reasons that the thangkas in the distant area’s monasteries may be among the country’s oldest—and most vulnerable.

“Bhutan is the last frontier—Tibet is gone; Nepal’s culture is a fusion,” Jose had explained before the trip began. We were in his work studio, a performance hall with orange-and-gold walls, in Thimphu, Bhutan’s booming capital (population: 100,000). Jose, a stout Filipino with a predilection for Hawaiian shirts, has seemingly boundless reserves of energy, which is fortunate considering the daunting project he’s assigned himself: to train eight Bhutanese monks in the art of conserving thangkas over the course of 10 years. All around us, monks were hunched over wooden tables, repairing colorful scroll paintings and stitching silk brocade borders onto them. “Things will change in Bhutan—they already have,” Jose continued. “The best we can do now is to help preserve this heritage and art for future generations.”

Famously cloistered and tentative in its approach to the modern world, Bhutan, sandwiched between China and India in the Himalayas, is in the midst of an unprecedented transition. Foreign visitors were not allowed inside the kingdom’s borders until 1974, but in recent years the doors have opened wider. Television and the Internet arrived in 1999, cell phones in 2003, and luxury tourism in 2004, with the development of the high-style Uma Paro hotel and the first of six properties in Bhutan from Amanresorts founder Adrien Zecha. This past March, the country held its first democratic elections, moving from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one with a parliament.

The man behind Bhutan’s unshuttering—as well as its surprising political shift—is the former king himself, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, whose ambition since his 1974 coronation has been to modernize the country without destroying its cultural heritage. The king’s efforts—which include mandating a national costume, the kimono-like gho and kira—can seem a bit awkward. But consider what is at stake: Bhutan is one of only two countries in Asia that have never been colonized, and today it possesses the world’s purest Tantric Buddhist culture, transmitted unbroken from generation to generation since the eighth century. Bhutan also has no tradition of art conservation—an ominous absence, considering the flood of change at its doorstep.

In preparation for “The Dragon’s Gift,” the Honolulu Academy of Arts also hired Core of Culture, a Chicago-based dance preservation group, to record and archive the country’s Cham (ritual dances), which are, like the thangkas, at risk of disappearing. Karma Tshering, a Bhutanese filmmaker who is helping document the rarest of the dances step-by-step before the dance masters grow too old to perform them, says the project comes not a moment too soon. For him, it’s personal: “When these things are gone, our identity is lost.” Throughout my visit, the people I spoke with described this sense of accelerated loss, as young Cham dancers and would-be monks leave their villages to seek out tourism jobs in the cities, and modern imports—iPods and conservation techniques alike—blow through society for the first time. The future is inscrutable; the past, suddenly precious. There is a new awareness of the value of preservation.

Until recently, sacred objects in Bhutan were simply used until they fell apart, or repainted when they started to fade. The principle of impermanence, after all, is one of the hallmarks of Buddhism. But the prevailing thinking is shifting. In an interview with His Eminence the Tsugla Lopen, the director of a newly formed cultural preservation branch within the central monastic body, I brought up the apparent contradiction between Buddhism’s embrace of transience and conservation’s quest for permanence. The Lopen, a solemn man in saffron robes, suddenly broke into a grin. “Yes,” he said, while an assistant translated. “If we went strictly by the doctrines, we would let the thangkas deteriorate. But we are clinging to them for the sanctity of all beings—and that is central to Buddhism, too.” He takes a similarly pragmatic approach to the exhibition, which will send some of his country’s most sacred objects around the world for two years. The more people who see them the better, the Lopen believes. But in order to ensure that the objects retain their sacredness, three monks will accompany the exhibition to each city and bless the works every day.

We arrived at Trashigang Dzong, a 17th-century fortress and monastery set high on a cliff above two rivers, after three days on the road. The head lama greeted us in his office, then led us up and down a labyrinth of ladders and dark hallways to the main temple. We sat cross-legged in the dim and incense-filled room as a parade of young monks presented the temple’s 90 thangkas.

There were gold-leafed paintings of the Wheel of Life, images of wild-eyed, wrathful deities dancing on naked corpses, and depictions of serene green taras, the goddesses of universal compassion. With every reveal came gasps—at either the beauty of the work or the depth of the damage (some were literally in shreds). Unnerved by the monks’ rough handling, Jose demonstrated the gentlest way to roll a thangka: Grasp the silk border and keep steady pressure as you roll, taking care to smooth the wrinkles in the silk covering.

The daylight was fading, more lamps were lit, and yak-butter tea was brought around. This ancient temple had cell-phone reception. Its monks likely had e-mail addresses. And yet the modern world felt very, very far away.

Facts: Bhutan

It’s not as difficult to travel to Bhutan as you may think. A registered Bhutanese tour guide can handle all the details, securing the required visa and permits, booking your flight (on Druk Air, the country’s only airline, from Bangkok, Calcutta, Kathmandu, or Delhi), and arranging for payment of the $220 daily minimum tourist fee, which includes basic accommodations, meals, and all transportation. (You’ll pay a premium to stay at one of Bhutan’s new luxury hotels, including the six Amans, Uma Paro, or the new Taj in Thimphu.) You won’t find a more reliable, knowledgeable, or enthusiastic guide to Bhutan than Tsewang Nidrup of Bhutan Expeditions (bhutan-expeditions.com.bt; 97-5/232-6266).

Exhibition Info

“The Dragon’s Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan” will be at the Honolulu Academy of Arts through May 23, 2008. Future venues include the Rubin Museum of Art in New York (September 18 to January 5, 2009) and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (February to May, 2009).

Cham Etiquette

If you can’t time your visit to coincide with one of Bhutan’s many annual tsechus (festivals featuring cham, or ritual dances), you can ask your guide to arrange for a demonstration performance at the Royal Academy of Performing Arts in Thimphu. Remember that the Bhutanese do not consider cham or tsechus entertainment. “Generally, they’re religious experiences to be witnessed once a year,” says Karma Tshering, the Bhutanese filmmaker helping document ritual dances for Core of Culture. “The masked dancer is not seen as an entertainer, but as a deity in a state of meditation, there to bless the crowd.” Therefore, it is important for visitors to stay off the ritual dance area, usually a stone or dirt courtyard, which is considered sacred. Also, always ask permission to take photos; if it is granted, stand behind the seated Bhutanese, not in front of or among them.

“Modern architecture is like a black dress or a trench coat: it’s classic, and you can’t get tired of it,” declares Los Angeles fashion designer Trina Turk. We’re sitting in the living room of her 1936 weekend house in Palm Springs, California, known as the Ship of the Desert for its yachtlike appearance. The structure’s “prow” juts out from the mountainside, granting panoramic views of the surrounding desert: lunar hills dotted with cacti and palm trees, labyrinthine housing developments built around lush lagoons and golf courses. Turk motions toward the clean lines, bare walls and expansive windows of her home. “I’m visually bombarded by so many prints and colors in my workday, so being here is a relief,” she says.

Turk and her husband, photographer Jonathan Skow, give me the grand tour, pointing out the kidney-shaped pool, the curvy dining room, the porthole window in the kitchen, and the master bedroom, with its thirties lighting salvaged from a Belgian school. (Skow is an obsessive collector of period fixtures.) Amazingly, though the residence looks almost exactly as it did when it first went up, it’s essentially a new building: six months into its renovation, in 1998, the house burned in a fire (it was arson), and the couple had to begin all over again. “The fire was incredibly devastating at the time,” Turk tells me, “but in the end, it allowed us to bring the house even closer to its original design.”

We step onto a redwood deck that abuts the San Jacinto Mountains. I have been to Palm Springs before, but until this trip, I never truly engaged with the city’s renowned midcentury modern architecture. So when I ask the well-connected designer about the social scene, I’m pleased to hear that my plan for the next four days — gaping at people’s houses in the name of architectural edification — is a very Palm Springs thing to do, at least among the new guard. “Life here is driven by everyone’s desire to see everyone else’s homes,” Turk says, laughing. “We meet people through architecture. We all do the tours” — offered annually by the Palm Springs Modern Committee and the Palm Springs Art Museum — “and most weekends we’ll have dinner at a friend’s house, then head over to someone else’s place for cocktails. There’s a wealth of amazing houses. I’ve stumbled on martini-shaped pools with fountains in the middle, lots of round fireplaces, plenty of sunken conversation pits.” It helps that Turk and Skow possess Palm Springs’ ultimate social capital: a home people are dying to see.

This town has a right to be house-proud. from the twenties through the sixties, Palm Springs evolved from a Wild West outpost to a glamorous getaway for social swells, like Walter and Lenore Annenberg and Jack and Ann Warner, and celebrities, like Clark Gable, Bob Hope and Marilyn Monroe. Back then, studio contracts kept actors on a short leash, requiring that they stay within a two-hour drive of the set. Palm Springs, just 108 miles east of Los Angeles, fit the bill. In the fifties the Rat Pack colonized the town; picture Frank Sinatra hoisting a flag at his Twin Palms estate, an invitation to his movie star neighbors to join him for drinks.

Another breed of star discovered the desert in the thirties and forties. Drawn here by Palm Springs’ agreeable climate and plentiful land, such celebrated architects as Richard Neutra, William Cody and Donald Wexler transformed the city into an architectural laboratory, designing avant-garde vacation homes and commercial buildings for affluent, adventurous clients. Today Palm Springs has the highest concentration of midcentury modern buildings among cities of its size; it is, according to local architecture expert Robert Imber, “the mecca of modernism.” Architecture pilgrims come from as far away as Germany and Japan to ogle the stylish white boxes, which still look design-forward, with their floor-to-ceiling windows, brave angles and innovative use of industrial materials, like corrugated metal and concrete.

After decades of neglect (beginning in the seventies, with the oil crisis), Palm Springs roared back to life a few years ago, revived by a fleet of stylish new hotels and restaurants and, once again, a sprinkling of Hollywood stars and industry insiders. They come for many of the reasons the last generation did — the proximity to Los Angeles, the social acceptability of downing cocktails at midday, preferably poolside — and for new reasons as well: the gay-friendly atmosphere (the gay population is seven times the national average); surprisingly sophisticated restaurants (Copley’s, at Cary Grant’s old estate, and the Austrian-inspired Johannes are two personal favorites); and the dozen or so midcentury modern furniture shops, where visitors can still find great deals on pristine pieces salvaged from local estates.

Shortly after arriving, I dropped my bags at the Parker Palm Springs, a hotel that embodies the city’s singular style. Designer Jonathan Adler renovated the thirteen-acre property in 2004 in a manner that is, well, what’s the opposite of minimalist? My room was decorated with, among other things, a white-lacquered four-poster bed, a leopard-print bench, a Moroccan leather pouf, a woven wall hanging from the seventies, framed paparazzi photos and a collection of Adler’s signature ceramics and kitschy needlepoint pillows. But somehow it all worked. The hotel and its Eden-like grounds practically demand relaxation: guests can lounge under jaunty umbrellas by any of the three pools, in hammocks slung between palm trees or in butterfly chairs arranged around a firepit ringed by grapefruit trees. Late one afternoon, a couple padded by wearing gigantic sunglasses and the hotel’s matching bathrobes and slippers while room service waiters pedaled down the meandering pathways on snazzy oversized tricycles — stylish reminders that Palm Springs has entered a new golden age.

The city’s rebirth was a long time coming. After the glamour seeped out of Palm Springs in the seventies, along with the money, the town’s economy flagged and once revered buildings sank into disrepair. From an architectural standpoint, the recession here turned out to be a blessing in disguise: while wealthier surrounding cities, like Palm Desert and La Quinta, exploded with shopping centers and golf communities, Palm Springs lay dormant, its old buildings intact. Flash forward to the early nineties, when the Los Angeles and New York design cognoscenti realized they could buy and restore stylish midcentury modern weekend houses for a fraction of the cost elsewhere. Among the first to arrive, in 1993, was Jim Moore, the longtime creative director of GQ, who restored a 1960s Donald Wexler steel tract house and invited his photographer friends to use the place for photo shoots.

As with South Beach, whose renaissance in the late eighties was driven by a fashion crowd drawn to the neighborhood’s Art Deco style, Palm Springs’ revitalization was ignited by a new generation’s appreciation for its treasures. “Rediscovering modernism was the spark that fueled the fire,” says William Kopelk, president of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, one of three major preservation organizations in town. Since that time, the movement has shown no signs of flagging. “The houses that sold for $100,000 in the late nineties are selling for $500,000 to $1 million now,” he adds. “The so-called ugly ducklings of architecture have been transformed into swans.”

The pace of development here will only escalate. The city has issued more building permits in the past two years than at any other point in its history, paving the way for more than 4,000 residential units and several major hotels: a Mondrian, a Hard Rock and an unprecedented ten-story casino and spa resort owned by the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, the city’s largest landholder. “In five years Palm Springs will look nothing like it does today,” notes Ken Lyon, a city planner. He says it cheerily enough (Palm Springs could use an economic boost), but in a place renowned for its frozen-in-time architecture, there’s something ominous about the prediction.

For a crash course in Palm Springs’ architectural uniqueness, you can’t do better than spend an afternoon with Robert Imber, the city’s de facto architecture historian and one of its most passionate preservationists. I had eagerly booked his three-hour tour, given twice daily, shortly after my pit stop at the Parker. The fifty-eight-year-old Imber, his gnomish features accentuated by octagonal eyeglasses, says he was “born living and breathing architecture.” He’s not exaggerating: while growing up in St. Louis, he’d ride his bike to new subdivisions and knock on doors, hoping for a glimpse inside. (“That stopped working when I was in my forties,” he says with a straight face.) For his bar mitzvah, he asked his parents for subscriptions to House Beautiful and Architectural Digest.

Imber’s depth of knowledge about every building in town is exhaustive and, sometimes for the tour goer, exhausting. As we drove along streets lined with shaggy palm trees and manicured privacy hedges in Las Palmas, one of the city’s tonier neighborhoods, he pointed out houses in every direction, rattling off a celebrity-home who’s who: Liberace’s house, with curlicued metal Ls on the garage and a fifteen-foot-tall candelabra on the lawn; Clark Gable and Carole Lombard’s traditional Spanish colonial; Lily Pad, Lily Tomlin’s getaway; Elizabeth Taylor’s estate; and the formerly futuristic House of Tomorrow, where Elvis and Priscilla Presley spent their honeymoon in 1967.

“This is the most important house in Palm Springs,” Imber declared as we rolled up to the Kaufmann House. Richard Neutra designed it in 1946 for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fallingwater. Neutra described the steel and glass house, whose stone walls appear to sprout organically from its terrain, as “a machine in the garden” that juxtaposed a “man-made construct onto a wild, unrefined, natural setting” (at the time it was built, the house was surrounded by acres of rugged desert, with only one other structure in sight). Beth and Brent Harris bought it in 1993; with the help of the architecture firm Marmol Radziner and Associates, they embarked on a meticulous six-year restoration, even convincing a Utah quarry to reopen a long-closed section of its site so the veins of the new sandstone would match the old. Their efforts, and a subsequent spate of magazine articles, refocused national attention on Palm Springs, which was still struggling to recover from its economic downturn. The Harrises are now divorced, and on May 13, Christie’s will auction the house, with opening bids set at $15 million.

The ten blocks of downtown Palm Springs are home to a mishmash of styles — Spanish colonials with terra-cotta-tiled roofs; sculptural midcentury modern buildings — set against a backdrop of majestic mountains. At least that’s what it looks like today, pre–development boom. Preservationists are fighting to keep that eclectic character, trying to steer developers toward adapting old buildings for new uses instead of simply bulldozing them. Sidney Williams, associate curator and liaison for the architecture and design council at the Palm Springs Art Museum (and daughter-in-law of E. Stewart Williams, the local architect who designed it), has lived in Palm Springs for more than thirty years and treasures its village atmosphere. “I don’t want to see downtown turned into an urban mall,” she says. “We’re not an old community” — the city was founded in 1938 — “but we have fine examples of architecture, and it’s a legacy we should protect.”

The greatest challenge, according to Imber, is education. “People recognize that Colonial Williamsburg and Arts and Crafts bungalows and gingerbread Victorians are historic, but they don’t understand why these little glass boxes should be saved,” he said. “Locals grew up in them, so they’re easily dismissed.” Several sites downtown, including the sinuous Town and Country Center shopping complex, with its hidden public courtyard, and the Santa Fe Federal Savings Bank, which appears to float on tapered steel columns, have been in limbo for years as their future is hashed out between their developer-owner and the city council. Imber sees room for compromise: “We need growth; we need improvement. But we also need to retain what makes Palm Springs unique. Preservation and development don’t have to be at odds.” For proof, he said, just look at Santa Barbara, Santa Fe and Portland, Oregon; all three cities have chosen to revitalize their old buildings rather than tear them down. “But the community has to appreciate what it has and be willing to fight for it.”

“Palm Springs was very groovy in the mid-nineties, when I started coming here,” recalled Catherine Meyler as she sat in the light-flooded living room of her weekend house. “It was still unknown, and you could get amazing furniture for nothing.” Meyler, a Los Angeles–based location agent who was raised in southeast England, scored her iconic Neutra residence, designed in 1937 for the St. Louis socialite Grace Lewis Miller, for just $250,000 in 2000. She showed me pictures of the place when she bought it; it looked like a haunted house (or “a crack den,” Meyler offered). “But I figured, however awful it seemed, it’s still a Neutra,” she said chirpily. “If I stripped it down, how bad could it be?”

Her intuition was spot-on. She handed me some photographs that the acclaimed architecture photographer Julius Shulman took of the home in the late thirties. When I held the Shulman photos up to Meyler’s recently restored living room, the verity to the original design was startling. Here was the tiny thigh-high closet where Miller kept her suitcase; there was the gray-stained plywood built-in furniture; just beyond the walls of glass was the desert garden, returned to its former glory by a local landscape architect.

Inspired by Meyler’s streamlined interiors, on my last day in town I quit the house touring and devoted myself to that other quintessential Palm Springs activity: shopping. Armed with Trina Turk’s short list of must-see boutiques, I headed to the Galleria, a warren of quirky closet-sized stores, and made a beeline for Bon Vivant, Turk’s favorite home-accessories shop. (Besides her own, that is; the first-ever Trina Turk Residential shop, stocked with brightly colored pillows in Turk’s custom fabrics, Missoni beach towels and chic ice buckets, just opened in Palm Springs.) After fondling handmade California pottery and copper enamel plates, I fell for a shiny gold owl pendant necklace. At Turk’s clothing boutique, designed by Kelly Wearstler, who also did the bold interiors at the Viceroy hotel, up the road, I plucked a sweet big-buttoned black coat from the sale rack. I admired a $14,000 leather-upholstered bedroom set from the late sixties at ModernWay, the first midcentury modern furniture shop to open in Palm Springs, in 1999, then made my way to the gallerylike Studio 111, where I debated blowing several months’ rent on an original zebrawood Herman Miller desk.

My last few hours in the desert disappeared into the vortex that is the 111 Antique Mall, a glorious pileup of Sputnik lamps, Danish teak furniture, knickknacks and one-of-a-kind miscellany, where I discovered, to my surprise, that I secretly craved an $1,800 heart-shaped bed with shiny red sheets and a built-in transistor radio. Palm Springs can do that to a person. This is where the Parker Palm Springs was born: the flamboyant John Connell, an owner of the mall — he introduces himself as the Bitch — sent eight truckloads of retro furniture to the hotel at Jonathan Adler’s behest. Eyeing a coffee table from the fifties, I asked Connell about refinishing the scratched metal. His response? “Don’t you dare; I hate you! You make it look new and people will go, ‘Meh.’ Leave it as is and they’ll say, ‘That piece is fabulous.’” Its history makes it interesting, dings and all. Just like Palm Springs.

Native Intelligence: Tips for planning your trip to Palm Springs

When to Go

Summers in this desert city (population 45,000) are hot and dry, with temperatures frequently topping 100 degrees. High season, January through May, brings milder temperatures (averaging in the mid-70s) and bigger crowds. Palm Springs is a two-hour drive from Los Angeles International Airport; you can also fly directly to Palm Springs International Airport from eighteen North American cities.

To immerse yourself in midcentury modernism, visit during the annual house tours given by the Palm Springs Modern Committee in April (April 5 this year; for 2009, see psmodcom.com) or during Modernism Week (modernismweek.com), a ten-day festival held every year in mid-February. The event includes house tours organized by the Palm Springs Art Museum, talks by architects and designers and the famous Palm Springs Modernism Show, a weekend-long sale of vintage 20th-century furniture and decorative arts. Architecture buffs must take Robert Imber’s intensive three-hour Palm Springs Modern Tours (from $75; 760-318-6118; psmoderntours@aol.com), given in a minivan or on Segway scooters. Reserve far in advance; both private and group tours fill up fast.

Where to Stay

Colony Palms Hotel Built by the mob as a cover for a brothel and a gambling house in 1936, the Colony Palms has a brand-new identity, thanks to a splashy $16 million makeover by celebrity decorator Martyn Lawrence-Bullard. The stylish hotel, as well as its restaurant and spa, retains its Spanish colonial exterior, but its forty-eight guest rooms and eight casitas channel Morocco with intricately embroidered headboards, terra-cotta-colored concrete floors in the ground-level rooms and cotton-ticking-striped curtains. Double rooms from $229, suites from $329, casitas from $379. 572 N. Indian Canyon Dr.; 800-557-2187; colonypalmshotel.com.

Korakia Pensione This private and serene twenty-eight-room bed and breakfast is carved out of two Moroccan- and Mediterranean-inspired villas and has keyhole archways, heavy wooden doors and whitewashed walls; some accommodations have sunken bathtubs. It’s a hot spot for fashion photo shoots and low-key romantic getaways. On weekends, classic and foreign films are screened outdoors in a bougainvillea-planted courtyard close to the hotel’s two pools. Double rooms from $159, suites from $299. 257 S. Patencio Rd.; 760-864-6411; korakia.com.

Movie Colony Hotel Popular among visiting architects, the recently restored Movie Colony was designed in 1935 by the Swiss-born architect Albert Frey. Its thirteen rooms and three town houses are decorated with vintage furnishings and original Julius Shulman photographs; many have metal-railed balconies that resemble ships’ decks. Don’t skip the five-thirty alfresco happy hour, with Dean Martinis, a nod to the Rat Pack. Double rooms from $199, town houses from $299. 726 N. Indian Canyon Dr.; 888-953-5700; moviecolonyhotel.com.

Parker Palm Springs This storied 132-room, twelve-villa estate — it was California’s first Holiday Inn, then Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch and Merv Griffin’s Givenchy Resort — has a new lease on life, owing to designer Jonathan Adler’s outrageous makeover, in 2004. On the thirteen-acre landscaped grounds are two pétanque courts, three pools and the cheeky Palm Springs Yacht Club, which is actually a 16,500-square-foot spa. For breakfast there’s Norma’s (its caramelized waffle stuffed with tropical fruit is not to be missed) and for dinner Mister Parker’s, a formal wood-paneled lair billed as a “hangout for fops, flaneurs and assorted cronies.” Double rooms from $295, villas from $995. 4200 E. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-770-5000; theparkerpalmsprings.com.

Viceroy Los Angeles interior designer Kelly Wearstler revamped the hotel from 2001 to 2003, infusing it with a wild Hollywood style. The sixty-eight rooms, including suites and villas, are now done up in a sophisticated white and black palette and have loads of mirrors and bright lemon yellow accents. The four-acre property encompasses three pools, the chic Citron restaurant and the decadent Estrella Spa, known for its indoor-outdoor treatments. Among the nice perks are complimentary “townie” bicycles and free yoga classes and guided hikes. Double rooms from $249, suites from $409, villas from $519. 415 S. Belardo Rd.; 800-670-6184; viceroypalmsprings.com.

To live like a local celebrity, if only for a night, book one of the city’s iconic houses. Beau Monde Villas rents the seven-bedroom, nine-bath, 4,000-square-foot neoclassical mansion formerly owned by Jack Warner, a founder of Warner Brothers ($3,700), as well as Frank Sinatra’s four-bedroom, seven-bath Twin Palms estate ($2,600), which has a piano-shaped pool and was the site of many legendary parties. 877-318-2090; beaumondevillas.com.

Where to Eat and Drink

Copley’s on Palm Canyon Chef and co-owner Andrew Manion Copley turns out creative Pacific Rim–inspired food, like ginger-encrusted Hawaiian opakapaka over wasabi potatoes, at his namesake restaurant, set in a hacienda that was once Cary Grant’s home. 621 N. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-327-9555.

El Mirasol This local hangout is celebrated for its potent margaritas and authentic Mexican dishes, such as pollo en mole poblano (chicken in red mole sauce) and crisp chicharrón (pork rinds) in tomatillo sauce. 140 E. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-323-0721.

Johannes Restaurant Minimalist interiors and an Austrian-inflected menu are the draws at Johannes, run by chef-owner Johannes Bacher. Start with a peach or cucumber martini and follow it with eight garlic-baked escargots and Bacher’s signature Wiener schnitzel, served with parsley potatoes and cranberries. 196 S. Indian Canyon Dr.; 760-778-0017.

Le Vallauris For more than thirty years, Le Vallauris has been the city’s top French restaurant. In good weather, forgo the refined dining room in favor of the romantic tree-shaded garden patio. The seared whitefish with mustard sauce and the roast rack of lamb with thyme and garlic are perennial favorites. 385 W. Tahquitz Canyon Way; 760-325-5059.

Melvyn’s The top attraction here—besides a restaurant that has hardly changed since it opened in 1975, menu included—is the late-night scene at its retro piano bar. Imagine a dance floor packed with an eclectic mix of energetic seniors, gaping twenty- and thirty-somethings and even the odd celebrity (during my visit, Will Ferrell sashayed in at 11 p.m.). 200 W. Ramon Rd.; 760-325-2323.

Where to Shop

Galleria Hidden within a 1940s arcade are ten small midcentury modern–focused galleries and shops, all worth a browse, particularly Bon Vivant, known for its reasonably priced housewares, pottery and glass. 457 N. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-323-4576; palmspringsgalleria.com.

ModernWay The first midcentury modern furniture store to open in Palm Springs is still the go-to place for rare, well-priced finds, especially hot-ticket pieces — white-lacquered lounges, chrome tables, Lucite-and-mirror desks — from the sixties, as well as modernist pieces from the early seventies. 745 N. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-320-5455; psmodernway.com.

111 Antique Mall It’s easy to get lost in this treasure (and bargain) hunter’s paradise, where you can wade through 12,000 square feet of period-appropriate furnishings and plenty of intriguing junk. 2005 N. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-864-9390; info111mall.com.

Studio 111 Pop into this boutique for outstanding midcentury paintings, sculpture and furniture, plus contemporary works by local artists. 2675 N. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-323-5104; studio111palmsprings.com.

Trina Turk and Trina Turk Residential Trina Turk’s clothing store sells Jackie O.–style eyewear and mod women’s dresses that are “perfect for a cocktail party by the pool,” says the designer. Turk’s new lifestyle shop, next door, displays vintage furniture and floor cushions upholstered in her hallmark graphic prints, as well as books on architecture, design and fashion and fine-art photographs by Turk’s husband, Jonathan Skow. 891 and 895 N. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-416-2856; trinaturk.com.

What to Do

Moorten Botanical Garden Founded in 1938 by Patricia and Chester “Cactus Slim” Moorten — a botanist and a character actor, respectively — this one-acre plot now blooms with 3,000 varieties of exotic desert plants. There’s also a nursery on-site where you can buy cactus cuttings. 1701 S. Palm Canyon Dr.; 760-327-6555.

Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Palm Springs is famous for its stunning desert scenery. Adventurous hikers can trek the North or South Lykken trail or the pristine Indian Canyons (theindiancanyons.com), but to view the entire valley, with minimal effort and maximum impact — and to experience the otherworldliness of being practically teleported from the desert to a snowcapped peak — take the fifteen-minute tram ride to the top of Mount San Jacinto. 1 Tramway Rd.; 760-325-1391; pstramway.com.

Palm Springs Art Museum This vibrant museum showcases modern and contemporary works by Robert Motherwell, Mark di Suvero and Edward Ruscha; glass art; and Mesoamerican sculpture. An exhibition of roughly 150 images by the ninety-seven-year-old architecture photographer Julius Shulman is on display through May 4; if you miss it, you can pick up the companion book, Julius Shulman: Palm Springs, at the museum store. 101 Museum Dr.; 760-322-4800; psmuseum.org.