A Cure for Modern Life

At Two Bunch Palms, an old desert hideaway outside Palm Springs, the prescription is wonderfully simple: warm water, dry air and the luxury of becoming temporarily unavailable.

There comes a point—usually somewhere between the twelfth notification of the morning and discovering that your phone has produced a weekly report on how badly you use your phone—when modern wellness begins to feel suspiciously like another job.

There are steps to count, sleep scores to improve, supplements to organise and morning routines requiring the discipline of a minor military operation. Even relaxation now arrives with targets. Apparently, we must optimise our rest.

Two Bunch Palms offers a rather more appealing proposition: go into the desert, lower yourself into warm mineral water and disappear for a while.

Set among 72 acres of palms and arid landscape in Desert Hot Springs, around 15 minutes from Palm Springs, the adults-only retreat feels less like a fashionable new wellness resort than a place that has been quietly waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Its natural spring flows from a 600-year-old aquifer, emerging at more than 100 degrees before feeding the mineral pools for which the property is known.

Long before California wellness acquired its green juices, expensive leggings and impressive vocabulary, these waters were significant to the Cahuilla people, who regarded the springs as a place of healing. The setting has changed over time, but the essential ritual has not: enter the water, become still and allow nature to do most of the work.

This is wellness in its oldest and least complicated form.

A VERY GOOD PLACE TO VANISH

Every proper desert retreat deserves a little mythology, and Two Bunch Palms has more than most.

The property has long been associated with Al Capone, who is rumoured to have used it as a hideaway during Prohibition. Tales of secret tunnels and discreet entrances have followed the resort for decades, although the connection remains firmly in the category of legend rather than proven history.

It almost doesn’t matter. The story fits because Two Bunch Palms has always possessed the particular glamour of a place designed for people who do not wish to be found.

By the 1950s, Hollywood figures were escaping the noise of Los Angeles for the anonymity of the desert. Palm Springs may have been the place to be seen beside a swimming pool, but Two Bunch Palms offered something more precious: the opportunity not to be seen at all.

That idea feels even more seductive now. Privacy once meant avoiding the newspapers. Today, it means escaping emails, photographs, group chats, location sharing and the faint suspicion that everything ought to become content.

Some rooms at Two Bunch Palms deliberately have no television. There is Wi-Fi, naturally—this is a retreat, not a hostage situation—but the point is that one might briefly forget to use it.

TAKING THE WATERS

The heart of the resort is the Grotto, where steaming mineral water sits beneath palms and open desert sky. Naturally rich in minerals including calcium, magnesium and lithium, the spring water has long been valued for its restorative qualities. Guests come to soak tired muscles, quiet busy minds and perform that increasingly rare activity: doing absolutely nothing without feeling guilty about it.

There are private teak tubs and individual treatment houses, along with massages, facials, wraps and rituals designed around rest rather than radical reinvention. The programme extends to yoga, Pilates, meditation, sound baths and breathwork, but nothing suggests that you must return home as a brighter, bendier or more spiritually evolved version of yourself.

You can take part in everything. You can also float in warm water beneath the stars and call that sufficient personal development.

This is what makes Two Bunch Palms so appealing. It understands that the exhausted do not necessarily require a punishing detox or a five-page analysis of their cortisol levels. Sometimes they need lunch, a nap and several hours during which nobody asks them a question.

DESERT TIME

The desert has always attracted people who want to begin again. Perhaps it is the scale of it: mountains in the distance, enormous skies and land so spare that the usual complications of life start to look faintly ridiculous.

At Two Bunch Palms, days are governed by simpler considerations. Is the water warm? Where is the shade? Shall we have another coffee? What time does the sun go down?

The property is lush where the surrounding landscape is dry, with ponds, olive trees and ancient palms creating the sensation of an improbable oasis. Rooms are relaxed rather than ostentatious, using natural materials, warm desert colours and the sort of beds that encourage poor timekeeping. The food follows the same uncomplicated philosophy, with seasonal, Southern California-inspired menus that lean towards vegetables without imposing a joyless sentence of leaves upon everyone.

There is wine, too. A detail worth noting in a wellness industry that can occasionally behave as if pleasure were the original toxin.

Nothing here appears to be trying too hard. The beauty is faded at the edges, earthy and pleasantly peculiar: less gleaming clinic, more secret desert compound belonging to an eccentric friend whose exact source of income has never been explained.

THE NEW LUXURY

We once measured luxury in visible abundance: more space, more marble, more attentive people arriving with tiny folded towels. Those things remain agreeable, but the definition is changing.

The rarest luxuries now are silence, privacy and uninterrupted time. A place where nobody needs an immediate response. A morning with no urgency attached to it. The freedom to be unreachable without having to invent a technical problem.

Two Bunch Palms has survived while generations of fashionable treatments, diets and philosophies have come and gone. It has done so by holding onto something elemental. The water continues to rise. The palms continue to cast their shadows. People arrive overstimulated and eventually remember how to sit still.

There is no dramatic transformation required. No public declaration of a new era. You needn’t return with a different personality, a collection of powders or an intention to wake at five every morning.

You might simply leave feeling a little more like yourself.

In modern life, that may be cure enough.