by Robert Spuhler
Outdoor dining, drinking, bathing and even outdoor massages.
It is no surprise that Castle Hot Springs makes full use of its stunning Sonoran Desert location, attempting to keep its visitors outside as much as possible. By creating as small a threshold between the indoor and outdoor worlds at Castle Hot Springs as possible, the design team created hospitality in the desert without shortchanging Mother Nature or luxury.
“From the interior standpoint, the goal was never to have the interiors be the focus,” according to Valerie Borden, the resort’s interior designer. “It was to make the exterior the focus.”
Visually, the outdoors and indoors are linked by color; the interiors of both rooms and common spaces around the resort focus on natural hues, especially ones that feel at home in the desert. Any hue that can be found in rock, in sand, and area vegetation can be found in the furniture, the bedding and even the materials (as seen in the comfortably worn leather chairs in the rooms).
“The directive was to pay honor to the history of this resort,” Borden says. “Everything from the colors and textures to the tiles, are something that you would have seen at the time, but it brings in all the colors from the springs.”
Creating this sort of indoor-outdoor flow isn’t just about paint swatches and color matching cacti. The design elements of the buildings themselves help break down that threshold between nature and shelter, as well. The shaded front porches of the bungalows and the outdoor patios off the restrooms with soaking tubs make it as comfortable to relax under the sky as it is to relax under a ceiling, and the open designs of both Harvest and Bar 1896 allow for cocktails and bites al fresco. Even the spa can meet you outdoors with the massage cabanas.
Within the rooms themselves, deliberate choices were made to minimize the dissonance between out and in; the lights in the rooms, rather than being either ceiling-down rays or bright spots of light from mega-watt lamps, instead wash the walls, making the illumination feel less direct and more like sitting in the shade.
“Most people don’t notice it, but it’s a subliminal experience,” Borden says. “You’re in the room and you feel good – and you don’t know why.”
Merging the outdoors and the indoors doesn’t just mean making inside feel more outdoorsy, though; if that was the case, the resort could just set up some tents and be done with it. For landscape designer Mary Hoffman, every choice down to the placement of the boulders on the grounds needed to straddle the line between comfortable and rugged, making the desert hospitable without turning it into a Disney-like facsimile.
“The landscape should make you feel anchored and relaxed,” Hoffman says.
By blending in, those design choices help the visitor feel like the grounds have been tailor-made for their experience, without noticing. But there’s one conspicuous decision that helps bring that feeling of being in nature home: the general lack of lighting at the titular hot springs.
“One lighting contractor said to me, ‘So now what are we going to do up here?’ And I said absolutely nothing,” Hoffman says, though she notes there is faint safety lighting in case of emergencies. “We really didn’t want it to feel like it was lit. I kept stressing over and over, especially up to the canyon, to be focused on restraint. We’re hoping people can just feel like they have completely removed themselves from everything that’s unhealthy in the world.”
Soaking in the uppermost pool at night, in only the dimmest of artificial light, certainly feels a world away.
Chimera Interiors is located in Scottsdale, Arizona.