Like ‘Elon Musk’s first colony on Mars’: US hotel is pure desert luxury

Dressed in torn cargo trousers and beaten-up Vans, architectural designer and DIY influencer Ben Uyeda is stretched out by the pool in a rare moment of repose on a recent Tuesday evening at Reset, his new hotel in the city of 29 Palms in California. “This is the best time to watch the mountains,” he says, looking south towards Joshua Tree National Park. “Right now they look really jagged, but they’ll turn soft and orange as the sun sets.” Sitting next to him are his collaborators Emi Kitawaki and Jen Whitaker of the design firm Gry Space, who created the look and tone of Reset’s spare, earthy interiors. Sharing a cold cucumber salad from the hotel restaurant, they gaze across the spacious pool area with its wide platform loungers and stucco walls that perfectly match the colour of the dusty desert landscape beyond. “The sky is the show,” Kitawaki says, looking up. Reset, which opened to the public this summer, is a new kind of hotel for the high desert: modern, minimal and modular. While the pool area, with its hot tub, sauna and thoughtful landscaping, is pure desert luxury, the rest of the hotel consists of 65 rectangular free-standing rooms laid out in neat rows. Each sparsely furnished room is outfitted with carefully selected amenities – a stylish solar lantern, in-room pour-over coffee, an outdoor fire pit and, most important, a sturdy cushion on the private outdoor patio for stargazing. “The best view here is always up,” Uyeda says. The rooms are not technically built from shipping containers, but with their boxy shape, corrugated silver sides and narrow dimensions, they look like it. Walking along the hotel’s concrete paths, the overall effect is more sci-fi than Old West. As one guest put it, “It feels like a test case for Elon Musk’s first colony on Mars.” The hotel designers say the evocation of space travel was deliberate. “When we came onto the project, the first thing Ben asked was, ‘What would humans do if we built a community on Mars?’” Kitawaki says. “Everything is designed from a more mission, utilitarian standpoint: what is actually needed?” A handful of new hotels have opened in the Joshua Tree area recently as tourism in the park has soared over the last several years. The most recent additions include the bare-bones Field Station, which took over the former TraveLodge in Yucca Valley in 2024, and Hotel Wren, a revamped 1940s roadside motel in 29 Palms that opened this year. Reset is the first hotel to be built from the ground up in the area in 15 years. Uyeda, who has more than 1.6 million subscribers on his YouTube channel HomeMade Modern, got involved with the project after building a shipping container house in Joshua Tree and releasing a docuseries detailing the process in 2020. A former professor of architecture at Northeastern and Cornell universities, he had noticed that as home prices skyrocketed, there was more interest in potentially more affordable construction like tiny homes, earthships – eco-friendly, self-sufficient houses – and container homes. “People say it’s a trend, but in fact only about 100 of these have been built,” he says. “I don’t have a negative take on shipping container houses, but if something was really moving the needle then more people would be doing it.” Soon after completing his shipping container house, Uyeda began having conversations with his now business partner, Adam Wininger, about how the rise of Airbnb was converting desperately needed housing in the desert to holiday rentals. They wondered if building modular structures on land that was already zoned for commercial use might be one solution to increasing lodging units without affecting the local housing supply. While modular building is not cheaper than a regular build, it is faster, especially in a remote desert location. The team acquired 180 acres (72.8 hectares) of property in 2020 and began construction in 2023. Room modules were made in a factory in Ancaster in the Canadian province of Ontario, while foundation work was being done at 29 Palms. Throughout the process, Uyeda promoted the hotel on his social media feeds by releasing DIY videos showing how he and his small team hand-built 500 pieces of furniture for Reset, including fold-out desks, sofas, daybeds and a vase made out of rock. He also offered his followers a sneak peek at Reset’s construction process. “So often you don’t know what’s real and what’s not,” Kitawaki says. “But when you come here, it feels personal. You’re connected to the items you see in the hotel because you saw how they were made.” So what is it like to stay in a futuristic, DIY desert hotel? “The word ‘Mars’ has come up a lot,” says a young man from San Francisco who was visiting with his girlfriend. “The name Reset feels apt. We definitely feel like we are taking a break from civilisation.” The hotel has four types of rooms – two offer desert views, two do not. I booked the Mountain View Suite, which has the most bells and whistles. In the context of Reset, this means it has a large window at one end of the unit that looks out towards the park, a sofa in the room and a soaking tub on the private outdoor patio. Like all the rooms, it is also equipped with an outdoor fire pit and a comfortable cushion for stargazing. The room was neatly ordered with walnut and cement accents. Nothing felt extraneous. Everything felt organic, a choice the designers said was deliberate. “It was all about, ‘How do we get the inside to look like the outside?’” says Whitaker, who with Kitawaki chose all the furnishings and finishes down to the organic bath products from Flamingo Estate. “It’s why we used so many materials from the land itself.” Reset is just six minutes from the 29 Palms entrance to Joshua Tree National Park, making the hotel a convenient base for exploring the park. It also offers easy access to the growing community of creative businesses in the town of 29 Palms. When I arrived at Reset, I was taken aback by the starkness of the space, but it did not take long for the hotel’s minimalism and clean lines to grow on me. Whether I was in bed, at the pool or lying on my private patio, the thoughtfully designed spaces always encouraged me to look out and up. I have spent a lot of time in the Mojave, and each time I visit, I am struck again by its otherworldliness. Sitting in my modular room at Reset, comfy in my little pod, I feel I could stare out at it all day.

Like ‘Elon Musk’s first colony on Mars’: US hotel is pure desert luxury

The Reset hotel just outside Joshua Tree National Park is a new kind of hotel for the high desert: modern, minimal and modular