A Photographer's Memory-Filled Journey through Palm Springs

POSTCARD FROM | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA

Chris Wallace takes a road trip through Palm Springs, California, capturing the places, people and things (oh so many things) that bring him closer to his late father. Unpacking memories and objects, Chris examines how the traces of our material life come to define us, outlive us and, ultimately, preserve us.

BY CHRIS WALLACE | CABANA TRAVEL | 21 JUNE 2025

My dad loved things. Deeply. Sentimentally. Maybe even a little bit irrationally, at times. Until the very end of his life, my dad was absolutely obsessed with a chest of drawers that his mother had left to him. A dresser, which had found its way into the possession of his sister, causing an irreconcilable falling out between the two siblings.

Because, I think, in my dad’s mind, this piece of wood and glue came to represent his mother’s love, held in it all his memories of his life with her, and he felt it had been unduly taken from him. So, well into his 80s, he could go off, screaming and sobbing about it — like a toddler, I thought, a bit harshly, at the time. Especially since, after his passing last year, I have been looking at things in a different light. Or at least at our orientation to things, the meaning we project onto them, the emotion we invest in them.

Right after my dad passed, the things he had on his person were sent to me — like a capsule biography in material things, a miniature portrait of the man he was — and I sort of incorporated them into my life, as a way to honor him. I started using his wallet, for one. A wallet I had actually bought for him on one of our trips together to Rome, a trip to celebrate our becoming pals in my adulthood. The wallet was a big deal for him, which he picked out at the Louis Vuitton store on the Via Condotti, so may have been a bit suggestive to him of la dolce vita to which he was forever in thrall.

So, if my dad was a bit weird about things, it seems to me that he was no more or less materialistic than most people I know (or see in the mirror). And he had some really great possessions, some of which he took pretty good care of. Like the grandfather clock from his childhood home in Independence, Missouri, where he lived with his uncle, the eventual President of the United States, Harry Truman.

I remember my dad lovingly recreating a pattern for, and painting the face of, this clock over a summer, as well as his continual, impulsive, and sometimes wonderfully bizarre upholstery projects — recovering his Saarinen womb chair in zebra skin, and a Jens Risom dining chair in Louis Vuitton logo canvas, a Mies van der Rohe MR chair in tiger-printed Sunbrella fabric, and so on.

In every one of my dad’s many apartments, I remember seeing the picture of him meeting the Pope, in 1953; a few worse-for-wear Nakashima bamboo and paper lamps, as well as a few lamps he had made himself, from deer antlers he’d picked up along the roadside in northern New Mexico. I thought of all of these things, taking stock, as I finally prepared myself to confront, and open, the storage unit in Palm Springs where my father had stashed the majority of his earthly possessions a short while before he’d died.

Images of The Parker Hotel and Korakia Pensione © Chris Wallace.

I started my stay at The Parker, which I thought would be an appropriate setting. I love the super maximalist Jonathan Adler design of The Parker — in a perfectly Palm Springs palette of pastels and neons — which so fits my dad’s own glitz and camp style that his whole apartment could’ve just moved over to the hotel without anyone noticing. In fact, had my dad not already parted with his massive acrylic chandelier that he hung over his Saarinen dining table, I would’ve offered it in payment for my suite.

But it was a very strange sensation, to be in this deliciously decadent place, so full of fun and glamour, a place I’d only come to with past loves, on celebratory occasions, to be digging through a dead man’s things. Weirdly, though, I think it helped. It gave context and life to my little storage unit plunderings that would have otherwise seemed like little orphaned goods, without their homes, without their comrades.

Fittingly, as I was now making the trip all about me, I moved over to the great little Korakia Pensione, a place I used to come before my dad moved to Palm Springs. Back then, while I was living in LA and trying to break into the film business, Palm Springs seemed like a million miles away, and the Korakia – which on one half is built to look like a dwelling in the Moroccan desert, and on the other a Spanish colonial outpost in the Balearics – even further still. The first time I came, with my then girlfriend, it seemed to me like I was entering the world of Paul Bowles short stories, so distant and enchanted the place felt to me. And, wonderfully, remarkably, none of that has changed.

In the mornings, I’d drive over to the storage unit and rummage, and sift, for as long as I could (squirreling away keepers, setting aside the clearly donate-able and disposable), and then retreat to The Parker, for cocktails by the pool, and little photoshoots of pop’s things in my suite. I don’t know if it was some sort of catharsis I was looking for, or some communion with my dad’s spirit, but it was actually quite fun. 

Korakia Pensione hotel, Palm Springs, California @ Chris Wallace. 

For a few days at the Korakia, I just baked in the sun, slept, and stewed in my thoughts about my dad. I must have written 10000 words about him, about his things, about what I’ve inherited, in material possessions, and, more importantly, in terms of taste, a way of seeing the world. I called friends who’d known him, who had been regular guests at his dinners (my dad was probably the best amateur cook I’ve ever met), and reminisced.

It is of course unimaginable how different I would be if not for his influence — his obsessions with celebrity and glamour and design and Golden Age Hollywood and travel have all fundamentally shaped who I am and even what I do for a living. But in those talks with friends, friends of mine who all inevitably became friends of his, I felt enormously proud of each of those little things in me that I could see so clearly came from him. 

Korakia Pensione hotel, Palm Springs, California @ Chris Wallace.

Finally, as I was driving away from Korakia, back to the airport, I was hit with a massive wave of grief. Of doubt. Of pain. Of regret, as if I were leaving him there, all alone in the desert — deserting him. Eventually my breathing started to slow, and my mind stilled.

No, I know better, I thought. I remember. I was there. Just as I then knew, somehow, that he too was there, with me. In that moment I knew, intensely, viscerally, that I will forever have him with me. How could I not? I have all of his things.