When Chad Johnson took over as general manager at Tamarisk Country Club, he went looking for the history he assumed would be everywhere. A club founded in 1952, the second eighteen-hole course built in the desert, with a membership roster that at various points included Jack Benny, George Burns, Danny Kaye and the Marx Brothers. He found nothing. No photos, no framed clippings, no acknowledgment that Ben Hogan had once been the club's first golf professional, teaching members on the same first tee that's still in use today. Someone had made a decision, years earlier, to take all of it down.
That decision has since been reversed. The photos are back on the walls, and the club's own messaging now leans into the era it once downplayed, invoking Bing Crosby and the old Palm Springs Golf Classic, the tournament that eventually became the Bob Hope Classic and is now The American Express. Tamarisk hosted that event nineteen times. None of this is new information if you already play there. What's worth noticing isn't when the walls filled back up, it's what that choice looks like now that Rancho Mirage is spending real money building something else entirely: a brand-new district engineered to feel established from its first season open. Set those two approaches side by side and you get a clearer read on how to spend a fall season here than any list of restaurant openings offers.
The logic behind putting the photos back
Johnson's own explanation, reported by the Desert Sun, was that clubs in his position usually avoid talking about their past. The industry standard is to sell what's new: renovated locker rooms, a rebuilt fitness wing, a redesigned tenth hole. History gets filed away because it can read as old, and old doesn't always sell memberships to a fifty-year-old buyer weighing four other clubs in the same zip code.
Tamarisk's bet ran the other direction. The club had something no amount of renovation budget could manufacture: a documented, seventy-plus-year run as one of the desert's original social hubs, with a golf lineage that traces to the sport's most decorated instructor. That's not an amenity you install. It's a record you either have or don't, and Tamarisk had been sitting on one while presenting itself like every other club with a new grill room.
The same math, on a longer clock
Sunnylands runs a version of the same calculation every single year, and this fall is a clean example. The Center & Gardens closes for its annual summer hiatus and reopens on a fixed date, this year Wednesday, September 9. There's no ribbon cutting, no new wing, no press cycle built around the reopening itself. The nine acres of gardens are the same nine acres they've been since the estate opened to the public. The draw is a returning exhibition, Curating Canopy: Trees at Sunnylands, plus the standing rotation of the introductory film and the self-guided garden tour, and a detail worth putting on a calendar rather than a press release: birding walks run Thursdays at 8:45 a.m. from November through May, no reservation required.
Sunnylands isn't trying to be new. It's trying to be reliably itself on a schedule people can plan around, which is a different kind of value proposition than most fall openings make. The first two weeks after a September 9 reopening tend to be the quietest stretch of the entire season, before the snowbird calendar fills back in, which makes early-to-mid September the actual window for anyone who wants to walk the grounds without a crowd.
What the new construction is betting on instead
Compare that to what's rising off Monterey Avenue, between Gerald Ford and Frank Sinatra Drives, where Cotino, the Storyliving by Disney community, is opening the public portion of its town center this fall. Cotino Bay Beach, Dining and Shops will include a waterfront restaurant called Elevare, designed to look like a lighthouse and visible from Gerald Ford, along with an outpost of the Palm Springs specialty market On the Mark, a Canadian coffee brand called Artigiano making its U.S. debut, and a yoga studio, Khaga Yoga. It's a genuinely new commercial district built around a Crystal Lagoons-technology bay that didn't exist three years ago.
There's nothing wrong with that bet. It's simply a different one than Tamarisk's or Sunnylands'. Cotino is selling proximity to something manufactured to feel timeless, a curated beach and a curated Main Street built in a single construction cycle. Tamarisk and Sunnylands are selling the thing that can't be built on a construction schedule at any budget: an actual, continuous, decades-long record. One of these things you can buy the aesthetic of immediately. The other only accrues, one golf season and one garden season at a time, and no amount of capital compresses that timeline.
That's worth sitting with if you already live inside these gates, because it reframes what the neighborhood is actually offering you that a newer development a short drive away structurally cannot.
A season that rewards knowing the difference
None of this means ignore what's new. It means know which fall you're actually planning around, because a resident who lives near Tamarisk has genuine access to both models in the same few weeks:
- September 9 — Sunnylands reopens after its summer closure, with the Curating Canopy exhibition and the quietest visiting window of the year immediately after.
- Thursdays, November through May — Sunnylands' 8:45 a.m. birding walks, no reservation required, a standing routine rather than a one-time event.
- November 27 through 29 — the Desert Arts Festival returns to The River at Rancho Mirage, free admission and parking, ten to five each day, a useful two hours to send visiting family on the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend.
- Fall through winter — the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival announces its lineup for its annual January gathering, with the year-round Writers Series continuing at the Rancho Mirage Library and Observatory in the meantime. The marquee January sessions tend to sell out once the fall announcement lands, so the actual planning window is now, not January.
Notice what these four have in common. None of them are grand openings. They're recurring fixtures with fixed dates, the kind of calendar a longtime resident already half-knows and a newer one benefits from writing down.
The wall as the actual thesis
The empty wall at Tamarisk wasn't empty because there was no history to hang. It was empty because, for a stretch of years, someone in the club's leadership decided that history was the wrong thing to be selling. Johnson's read was that the opposite was true, that in a market where nearly every private club is chasing the same renovated-amenities pitch, the one thing a seventy-plus-year-old club actually has that a brand-new development cannot buy at any price is time itself, documented and displayed rather than boxed up.
Sunnylands operates on the same principle without ever having taken its version of the wall down. Its draw each September isn't a new feature, it's the reliability of the same nine acres reopening on schedule, year after year. Cotino is building something legitimately new nearby, and it will likely be excellent at what it's built to do. But it's a different offer entirely, and a resident who understands the difference gets more out of a Rancho Mirage fall than one who treats every new opening in town as interchangeable with what was already here.
If you're already inside these gates, you already know most of this. What's easy to lose track of, three golf seasons and two remodels into living here, is how much of what makes this specific stretch of Rancho Mirage worth staying in was never new to begin with, and how deliberately Tamarisk itself decided to start saying so out loud again.
For questions about what's changing in the neighborhoods around Tamarisk, or a longer conversation about the Coachella Valley's country club corridor, Benjamin Melendez welcomes a private consultation.
