With ‘highway commercial’ zoning that would encourage strip retail malls along the city’s main vehicular route, Highway 111, the City of Indian Wells was poised to continue the auto-oriented strip retail development like other cities along the corridor.  Seeing an opportunity to distinguish and differentiate itself, the City rezoned the three- and one-half mile highway corridor limiting uses to landscape buffer and residential development.  Despite strong support from the community, several owners who were subject to the zone change filed lawsuits against the city for ‘downzoning’ their properties.  The council decided to adopt a Specific Plan for the highway frontage supporting its vision for the city.

The Specific Plan includes a combination of residential, resort, community and open space uses.  Research of the city’s history discovered that the highway right-of-way was once an airplane landing strip.  The city also had been the location of many date groves, and a few remnants still existed.  The team’s research discovered the location of one of the original Indigenous tribe’s wells within the highway corridor and included it in the plan for restoration.  The plan proposed a landscape zone on both sides of the highway, prescribing a ‘formal’ edge of date palms in multiple rows on the north side compatible with a resort hotel and golf course there, and a more informal landscaped edge on the south side deferring to the smaller scale of its single-family homes. The project captured elements of the ‘real’ desert, visually framing them, like California plein air desert paintings.