Coming from most Southern California cities, the drive to Reset Hotel unfolds as a gradual subtraction. Buildings thin. Traffic disappears. Crowds between one place and another begin to vanish. By the time Joshua Tree's granite formations rise from the desert floor, the landscape feels almost limitless.

I once heard a story about someone who had spent their entire life in Chicago—a city of dense neighborhoods, buildings stacked upon buildings, and a skyline punctuated by skyscrapers. When they visited Joshua Tree for the first time, they stayed inside their room for two days, overwhelmed by the openness. I imagine they felt untethered, perhaps even insignificant, swallowed by the vastness of the landscape.

Just a few steps from the Reset Hotel, hiking trails extend into the desert. Within a few minutes’ drive, Joshua Tree National Park unfolds in every direction. Easing into this immensity, allowing oneself to experience awe, requires a kind of anchor. Staying at Reset provides both a literal and metaphorical anchor—an entry point and container for encountering the desert without becoming lost within it.

Crossing onto the Reset Hotel property, designed by the architectural firm M-Rad Inc. in collaboration with co-founder and creative director Ben Uyeda, alongside interior and visual collaborators Emi Kitawaki and Jen Whitaker of Gry Space, the pattern, proportion, and balance our brains are wired to seek is present. Buildings hold us, make us feel safe and contained, within the "the shapeless flow of reality," in the words of Finnish architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa. 

Like a desert oasis, a hotel promises food, drink, and refuge, as well as an orientation in an otherwise monumental landscape. At Reset Hotel, the Mojave Desert is punctuated by rows of charcoal-gray, single-story structures whose restrained geometry echoes the modular simplicity of shipping containers. Their repetition creates a quiet visual cadence against the seemingly infinite horizon. Reset’s architecture mediates between ourselves and the scale of the desert. 

Modern life continually compresses our experience of space. Cities grow denser. Screens flatten distance. Notifications collapse one moment into the next until our attention rarely settles long enough to encounter true expansiveness.

At Reset Hotel, space returns…

Continued on page 34 of Issue 01 with Reset Hotel photos by David Perez