The story of Samantha Davis House should really be titled “how to move to Palm Springs in 10 Days". It goes like this: I was living in Brooklyn after my ten year stint in the Bay Area and my mom had just moved to South Florida. I was flying down every month or so for about a week at a time and spent a year combing through properties in Miami Beach with hopes of finding an Airbnb project for myself.

Fast forward to my first trip to Palm Springs to check out a friend’s hotel project. In the course of this two day trip, I would extend the trip an additional two days and book a return trip the following week. I wound up investing in the hotel, opening an ice cream shop and my little Miami vacation house was found in the Mojave Desert instead.

I give a lot of credit to the very patient realtor who took me seriously when I phoned him and said “I have 25 houses to see. If you show them all to me I promise to buy one by the end of the weekend.”

We both held up our ends of the bargain. We saw 18 houses in one day and the rest the next with enough time to double back to the top contenders.

Samantha Davis House gets its name from that first day in Palm Springs when I came to check out the hotel. The Arrive Hotel was still a dirt lot so we spent most of our time cruising town to learn about the existing hotel scene which came with a heavy dose of Rat Pack-laced celebrity history. That day with my own name being too much for many valets on the go, and being the only black person in a group of young white men, Sammy Davis came to mind as an easy alias - but make it a girl, which brings us to Samantha. She’s not exactly an alter ego but she is who I thought of during every step of designing this home.