The Uptown Design District, on foot, over several weeks

Culture · Palm Springs

What is the Uptown Design District in Palm Springs?

The Uptown Design District runs along North Palm Canyon Drive at the top end of downtown Palm Springs. It is a walkable stretch of mid-century modern buildings holding design shops, vintage furniture dealers, galleries and places to eat, with the mountains closing off almost every side street. It is one of very few genuinely pedestrian districts anywhere in the Coachella Valley.

For someone passing through, this is an afternoon of browsing. For someone living in Palm Springs for a month or more it becomes something more useful: the one district where you can park once and do several unrelated errands on foot, and where the stock turns over often enough to reward a second and third look. Vintage and design inventory changes constantly. A shop with nothing in it in week one has the thing you wanted in week four.

Go on a weekday morning. Uptown opens later than you might expect — this is not a district that gets moving at 8am — but mid-morning on a Tuesday you have the sidewalks to yourself, the light is still soft on the west-facing facades, and the people behind the counters have time to talk. That conversation is where the useful information lives: what is arriving, which building was designed by whom, which sale is worth coming back for. On a Saturday in February you will be shoulder to shoulder and nobody has a minute for you.

Look up, and look at the buildings rather than through them. Mid-century modern architecture is the defining built character of Palm Springs, and Uptown is where you can read it at walking pace: breeze-block screens that shade a wall while letting air move through it, deep overhanging eaves, clerestory windows set high to bring in light without heat, folded and butterfly rooflines. Once you have the vocabulary, you will see the same moves in the residential streets of Movie Colony, Deepwell, Las Palmas, Sunmor and Racquet Club Estates for the rest of your stay.

The honest tradeoff is that Uptown is small and it is not cheap. This is a design district, not a bargain district, and if you treat it as shopping you will exhaust it in a handful of visits. It also becomes unusable in the heat: from June through September, with highs commonly between 108 and 115 degrees, the sidewalks are too hot in the afternoon and the district effectively runs on early mornings and evenings like everything else in the city. Walk the west side of the street in the morning and the east side late in the day, which is where the shade actually is.

If you're here for a month or more

The walk is the point, not the purchase. Over a month you can fold the district into a weekly loop — coffee at the north end, the length of North Palm Canyon Drive on foot, down into Downtown and back — and you will start noticing which windows changed and which buildings did. If you are still choosing where to base yourself for a long stay, being within walking distance of Uptown or Downtown is the single decision that most reduces how often you touch the car.