Dress with torny cargo pants and hit vans, the architectural and influential designer of DIY, Ben Uyeda, spread next to the pool in a rare moment of rest on a recent Tuesday night in the Restart, his new hotel in 29 Palms.
“This is the best time to see the mountains,” he said, looking south towards the direction of the Joshua Tree National Park. “At this moment they look really irregular, but they will become soft and oranges as the sun sets.”
You can see a bright mountain orange at sunset from one of the 65 modular rooms of the hotel restart.
Sitting next to him were his collaborators Emi Kitawaki and Jen Whitaker of the design firm Gry Space that created the appearance and tone of the land interiors and replacements of Reset. By sharing a cold cucumber salad from the hotel's internal restaurant, they looked through the spacious area of the pool with their wide blunders of platform and stucco walls that coincided perfectly with the color of the dusty landscape beyond.
“The sky is the show,” Kitawaki said, looking up.
Reset, which opened to the public this summer, is a new type of hotel for the high desert: modern. Minimum. Modular. While the pool area with its hydromassage, sauna and reflective landscape bath is pure luxury of the desert, the rest of the hotel consists of 65 rectangular and independent rooms established in ordered ranks. Each scarcely furnished room is equipped with carefully selected comfort that suggests a highly cured camp trip: an elegant solar flashlight, coffee in the room, an outdoor fire well and, most importantly, a resistant cushion in the private outdoor patio for the stars.
“The best view here is always up,” said Uyeda.
The influence of Ben Uyeda Di Bricolaage collaborated with the Visual Designers Emi Kitawaki and Jen Whitaker of Gry Space to create the earthy and modern appearance of the Restart Hotel.
The rooms are not technically built from shipping containers, but with their square shape, corrugated silver sides and narrow dimensions, they surely seem. Walking along the hotel concrete paths, the general effect is much more science fiction than Old West. As a guest said: “He feels like a test case for the first colony of Elon Musk on Mars.”
Hotel designers say that the evocation of space trips was deliberate.
“When we arrived at the project, the first thing Ben mentioned was what humans would do if we built a community on Mars,” Kitawaki said. “Everything is designed from one more mission, utilitarian point of view: what is really needed?”
Whitaker and Kitawaki chose spare and earthly furniture for the rooms of the Reset hotel. The goal was to “bring outside,” Whitaker said.
A DIY hotel
A handful of new hotels opened in the area of Joshua Tree, since tourism to the park has shot in recent years. The most recent additions include basics Field station, who took over the old travel lodge in the Yucca Valley in 2024 and Wren hotelA renewed motel on the road of the 1940s in 29 palm trees that opened this year. But the restart is the first hotel that is built from scratch in the area in 15 years.
Uyeda, which has more than 1.6 million subscribers on its YouTube channel Modern homemadeHe got involved with the project after building a shipping container house in Joshua Tree and launching a docuseries that detailed the process in 2020. A former architecture professor in the universities of the Northeast and Cornell, had realized that as the housing prices shot, there was a corresponding increase of interest in a potentially more affordable construction such as small homes, land and recipients. “People say it is a trend, but in fact only about 100 of these have been built,” he said. “I don't have a negative version of shipping containers houses, but if something really moved the needle, more people would.”
Uyeda and his team made approximately 500 furniture for the restart hotel. The rooms are furnished with a solar flashlight, a Bluetooth player and a stone vase that Uyeda made.
Coffee supplies inside one of the rooms.
Shortly after completing his shipping containers house, Uyeda began to have conversations with his now Adam Wininger commercial partner about how Airbnb's emergence was becoming housing desperately necessary in the desert to vacation rentals. They wondered if the construction of modular structures on land that was already in areas for commercial use could be a solution to increase accommodation units without affecting the supply of local housing. While the modular construction process is not cheaper than a regular construction, it is faster, especially in a remote desert location.
“We are both native Californians,” he said. “There is a real demand for this type of hospitality.”
Restart seeds were planted.
The team acquired 180 property in 2020 and began building in 2023.
The room modules were made in a factory outside the Ontario, Canada, at the same time that the foundation work was occurring in 29 palm trees. Throughout the process, Uyeda promoted the hotel in its food on social networks by launching DIY videos demonstrating how he and his small team were built by hand 500 furniture to restart. folding desks, Sofas, day beds and a roca while also offers his followers an advance of the Reset construction process.
“Very often you don't know what is real and what not,” Kitawaki said. “But when you come here, you feel personal. You are connected to the articles you see in the hotel because you saw how they were done.”
A view of the modular rooms.
Waking up on Mars
So what is it to stay in a futuristic DIY desert hotel?
“The word 'Mars' has emerged a lot,” said a young man from San Francisco who was visiting with his girlfriend. “The restart of the name feels suitable. We definitely feel that we are taking a break from civilization.”
The hotel has four types of rooms: two offer desert views, two no. I reserved the Mountain View suite, which has most of the bells and whistles. In the context of the restart, this means that it had a large window at one end of the unit that looked towards the park, a sofa in the room and a bathtub in the private outdoor patio. Like all the rooms, I was also equipped with a well -air well and a comfortable cushion for the stars.
A guest enters the luxurious pool area.
The room itself was carefully ordered with walnut and cement accents. Nothing felt strange. Everything felt organic, an election that the designers said it was deliberate.
“It was how to make the interior look like outside,” said Whitaker, who, with his partner, Kitawaki chose all the furniture and ends up to Flamingo's organic bath products. “That is why we use so many materials from the earth itself.”
The restart is only 6 minutes from the entrance of 29 Palms to the Joshua Tree National Park, which makes the hotel an easy home base to explore the park. It also offers easy access to the growing creative business community in the city of 29 Palms.
When I first arrived at the restart, I was surprised by the raw of space, but it did not take long that the hotel minimalism and the clean lines grew in me. Whether I was on bed, in the pool or lying in my private courtyard, the carefully designed spaces always encouraged me to look and look up.
I have spent a lot of time in the Mojave, and every time I visit they attack me again through their other world. Sitting in my modular room in the restart, comfortable in my small capsule, I felt that I could look at it all day.
