La Quinta Resort & Club, A Waldorf Astoria Resort

Set in the courtyard of a 1940s hacienda and bordered by terraced beds of flowers, trees, and its own restaurant, the sunken clubhouse court at the La Quinta Resort & Club has always seemed like a symbol of the resort’s commitment to tennis. Tennis there burst onto the national stage in 1978 when a consortium of former players led by Charlie Pasarell set out to build the finest resort tennis club on the planet. It became one of the first resorts to offer all three playing surfaces—hard, clay, and grass (though the grass is now gone)—and Pasarell and company made sure it rose to national attention by staging a professional tournament that eventually spawned into own stadium. Those were heady days and the tournament was the springboard for what is now the BNP Paribas tournament in nearby Indian Wells.

From the very beginning, I’ve been one of La Quinta’s staunchest partisans. Its Clubhouse Court is hands-down the most beautiful court at a resort anywhere, and the later addition of a spa next door and a courtside fitness center only seemed to add to the allure. At 21 courts—16 hard and 5 Har-Tru—it remains one of the larger resort complexes in the desert, and the facility has supplemented its tennis with the addition of 8 pickleball courts. The setting is magnificent, the rooms exceptionally comfortable, the cuisine excellent.

The original Spanish hacienda-style hotel and its 20 cottages opened in 1926 and immediately attracted Hollywood celebrities and California moguls, who braved 20 miles of bad road beyond Palm Springs to reach this retreat among citrus trees at the foot of the starkly imposing Santa Rosa Mountains. Since then the road has improved and the resort grown to 620 casitas and 98 villas. Yet this doesn’t feel like a large hotel. The scale remains low—nothing taller than two stories—and the rooms have been cleverly arranged around numerous small garden-like courtyards each containing a small swimming pool and hot tub (all in all, there are 41 pools and 53 hot tubs).

Although it is no longer difficult to reach the rest of Palm Springs desert and its many restaurants and galleries, there is little incentive to leave the resort. All the rooms are a short stroll from a flower-bedecked plaza of shops and restaurants, so why get in your car when you can stroll over to the Adobe Grill for fishbowl-size margaritas served in hand-blown glassware from Guadalajara or its superb dishes from various regions of Mexico, like grilled rack of lamb with roasted corn and date tamale from the Yucatan or Caldo de Mariscos, a southwestern bouillabaisse? Unless you’re here in March and have tickets to the Indian Wells Tennis Tournament, you’ll be perfectly content staying on property, playing tennis and relaxing at the spa or around one of the pools.

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