The 50-foot waterfall at The Willows, a sprawling estate-turned-hotel in Palm Springs, California, served as natural air-conditioning when it was built in 1925. It still works today. Open the floor-to-ceiling glass doors in the dining room and a cool breeze wafts in, providing relief from the desert heat. It’s 80 degrees out on a sunny spring morning as I butter an orange-rosemary muffin. “Eighty degrees? That’s just a kiss on the cheek here,” says Gordon, the morning innkeeper. I tell him he has tougher skin than I. Coming from Los Angeles, I’m used to a cool coastal breeze with my breakfast.

“So what are you up to today?” he asks, refilling my coffee. “Off to explore some midcentury architecture?”

“No,” I say. He raises an eyebrow. I explain that while I am a design fiend, I’ve seen the city’s Midcentury Modern buildings plenty of times. This time, my Palm Springs vacation comes with a twist: I’m here to track down places from the beginning, not the middle, of the 20th century.

He thinks for a second. “Well,” he concludes, “that’s a little more challenging in this city.”

Challenge accepted, I think to myself, noting the creative feat of engineering already in front of me.

It’s true that architecture and design buffs flock to Palm Springs for its Midcentury Modern offerings. The Modernist mecca boasts iconic designs by architectural giants such as Richard Neutra, John Lautner, Donald Wexler, and Albert Frey. Frey’s dramatic 1965 Tramway Gas Station greeted me as I drove into Palm Springs from Los Angeles the night before on Highway 111, a road I have traveled dozens of times before. The former service station, a bold, Space-Age structure with a soaring canopied roof, now houses the Palm Springs Visitors Center.

That’s the Palm Springs I know. I remember taking family trips to the city as a child and seeing midcentury buildings with swooping rooflines and lots of glass. They felt so different from the Spanish-style house of my early childhood in the San Fernando Valley. And as an adult, weekend getaways with friends to Palm Springs have always revolved around lounging by a pool, browsing the retro furniture stores, and driving through the Racquet Club Road Estates or Old Las Palmas neighborhoods, picking out our Modernist dream homes.

But before sleek lines and minimalist forms dominated Palm Springs’ landscape, the city was a small desert settlement, officially incorporated in 1938. And hundreds of years before that, ancestors of today’s Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla American Indians lived on the land, building rock-lined irrigation ditches to grow melons, beans, and corn. The story of Palm Springs begins well before that fabled Midcentury Modern era.

Gordon’s challenge rings in my ears as I approach a collection of small wooden and adobe structures in the Village Green, a park-like parcel of land on bustling South Palm Canyon Drive. One, the McCallum Adobe, was built in 1884 for John McCallum, the first permanent white settler in Palm Springs. It’s the oldest remaining building in the city and serves as the Palm Springs Historical Society’s museum and headquarters.

Renee Brown, director of education and associate curator at the historical society, meets me there. She tells me the story of McCallum, a San Francisco lawyer who came to the Coachella Valley in 1884 hoping its hot, dry climate would cure his son’s tuberculosis. McCallum persuaded others to join him, including his friend Dr. Welwood Murray. Murray was so impressed by the desert’s perceived healing powers that in 1886 he built a sanitarium, effectively creating the city’s first lodging, the Palm Springs Hotel.

Most of the hotel has been demolished, but a small 1893 structure known as Little House remains. The McCallum Adobe was relocated to the Village Green in the early 1950s on land donated by McCallum’s daughter, Pearl McCallum McManus, with Little House following in 1979.

“I like to say that this city really was built by women,” Brown tells me.

In 1909 another influential Palm Springs woman, Nellie Coffman, established a small health resort hotel called the Desert Inn and Sanatorium with her physician husband, Harry. Before it was demolished in the 1960s, the resort -- and Coffman’s famous charm -- attracted visitors from across the country. It cemented Palm Springs’ early and enduring reputation as a health resort destination and, later, as the preferred getaway for Hollywood stars such as Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, and Marlene Dietrich.

After Brown and I part ways, I follow her advice and amble up South Palm Canyon Drive to the site where the Palm Springs Hotel once stood. In the 1930s, winter resident Julia Shaw Patterson Carnell, a philanthropist from Dayton, Ohio, bought the land and commissioned Dayton architecture firm Schenck & Williams to design one of the city’s first shopping and residential complexes, now called La Plaza.

I find a shaded patio seat at Tyler’s Burgers, a simple burger-and-sandwich stand in a small 1930s Greyhound bus depot at the edge of La Plaza’s parking lot. As I relish my cheeseburger and down glass after glass of iced tea, I study the shopping center’s classic Spanish-style architecture: white stucco walls, red clay tile roofs, quatrefoil windows. Towering bougainvillea climbs the walls. Shoppers wander in and out of the complex’s casual-clothing stores, cafes, candy shop, and nail salons. The city’s first shopping center, though worn, is still a draw.

The next morning, with temperatures rising toward triple digits, I scrap my plan to hike the National Register–listed Tahquitz Canyon Trail. (The trail goes through the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation and still contains traces of the ancient irrigation ditches.) Instead, I find my nature fix in the shade at Moorten Botanical Garden, a monument to desert flora founded in 1938. I walk the winding paths lined with exotic cacti from the prickly pear to the giant cardón, as well as succulents and desert trees. The handful of other visitors and I observe the plants with a quiet reverence, allowing the songbirds overhead to provide the soundtrack.

Toward the back of the garden is another piece of local history: the original 1922 home of landscape photographer Stephen Willard, whose work hangs at the Palm Springs Art Museum. In 1955, Hollywood stuntman Chester Moorten and his wife, Patricia, purchased the Mediterranean-style residence and relocated their garden to the two-acre compound. Next to the house, to my surprise, is a short length of adobe wall. I run my hands over its rough surface. Turns out the wall is part of Welwood Murray’s Palm Springs Hotel, salvaged by the Moortens during the building’s demolition. “They wanted to save a piece of history,” explains Clark Moorten, the couple’s son and current owner of the garden.

Later that day, the sun sets behind the San Jacinto Mountains, casting dramatic shadows across the city. I return to the place where my trip began: The Willows. Originally the vacation home of Los Angeles businessman and politician William Mead and his wife, Nella, it was sold in 1929 to New York attorney Samuel Untermyer, and in the 1950s to actress Marion Davies. The house hosted notables such as Shirley Temple, Mary Pickford, and even Albert Einstein (whose preferred room I am staying in). After Davies moved out in 1955, it fell into disrepair. That is, until 1994, when Tracy Conrad and her husband, Paul Marut, purchased the Mediterranean villa and restored it down to every last Spanish tile and wrought iron detail. They reopened it two years later as an eight-room luxury inn.

I climb the trail through the terraced gardens at the back of the property to catch the sweeping views at the top. From my perch, I can see Palm Canyon Drive just two blocks away, with the rest of the city and the Coachella Valley beyond, palm trees punctuating the horizon. Particularly in the orange-and-purple glow of the sunset, I can see why people have long been drawn to visit and inhabit this region, why throngs of vacationers today feel that same fascination. This desert place is both resolutely old and thoroughly modern.