This article originally appeared in the December 2007 issue of ELLE DECOR. For more stories from our archive, subscribe to ELLE DECOR All Access.
Ask members of the Los Angeles hip set where they head for weekends, and Palm Springs—mod architecture, swinging nightlife—is often on the agenda. For Mike Clifford, however, the flannel-shirt earthiness of Idyllwild beats neo–Rat Pack blandishments any day. In this mountain town about an hour’s drive west of Palm Springs, Clark Gable hunted, naturalist John Muir camped, and Clifford goes on three-hour hikes with his yellow Labrador retriever, Buck. Visitors to the energetic publicist’s wood-shingled cabin here are out of luck if they want to keep in contact with their offices with urban ease: The most up-to-date personal communications tool is a bright red rotary phone. Yes, rotary.
“The whole point is to unplug completely,” says Clifford, who heads to Idyllwild every weekend he can when he’s not jetting between the Hollywood Hills and New York for work. “There’s only one movie theater, and they hand out lap robes. How cool is that?”
He was hooked on his first visit to the town, which is located at the heart of the San Bernardino National Forest. “It was 80 degrees in the desert below,” Clifford recalls, “and up here kids were having snowball fights. I thought that was incredible.” Plus, the pine-scented air and rocky escarpments reminded him of the Adirondacks of his native New York. And for a getaway connoisseur like himself, Idyllwild’s relative isolation and low-key activities ensured a measure of blessed solitude. As Clifford explains, “The area won’t be ruined because there’s nothing to attract hordes of tourists—there’s no lake and no skiing.”
The architectural range up here is relatively narrow too. Influenced by long-ago civic leaders who had an appreciation for alpine charm, Idyllwild is all about picturesque chalets with knotty-pine walls, rock chimneys, and weather-blackened-log construction. Hemmed by pines and manzanitas, Clifford’s home was built in the 1920s as a hunting lodge, similar to a far grander homestead nearby that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard used as a retreat. Its period appeal is largely intact, right down to the old outhouse, but Clifford—who possesses the kind of unerring taste that seasoned design professionals would kill for—has carefully updated the cabin (now named Buck Cottage) without undermining the attributes that make it special.
Windows were widened to open up the views of the forest and neighboring mountains, and doorways were slightly expanded to let in more room-to-room light. A pine-walled guest suite was added. The parched log beams were oiled to a lustrous gleam, and the Bavarian-style fretwork trim along the eaves was crisply stained. The kitchen, however, remains basic. There’s no modern coffeemaker, just an old-fashioned percolator heated on the gas stove. “You kind of rough it when you come here,” Clifford says. “It’s better not to have all that stuff.”
Still, it’s not like he is doing without. Though Clifford affectionately calls the town Mayberry-in-the-Mountains and prides himself on having no Internet access, Buck Cottage is hardly ascetic. Deep-dish seating fills the rooms, and warm blankets are at the ready. Clifford also had a hankering to put together a collection of pine furniture from the workshops of C. Selden Belden—a local midcentury craftsman who was heralded for handmade, artfully wormholed furniture—but he found almost nothing in area stores.
“People here hang onto their Belden stuff forever,” he says. So on a trip back east, Clifford raided antiques shops in the Adirondack resorts of Lake Placid and Saranac Lake for thematically appropriate accent pieces, including a rough-hewn armchair and a striking bookcase made from half an antique canoe. For the master bedroom, a side table was fashioned from a fallen tree found on the one-acre property, and a spin through a Paris flea market turned up three pairs of antlers that now hang above the brick fireplace in the great room.
Tour this cozy rustic cabin in the San Jacinto Mountains
Regular trips to eBay have played a part in the cabin’s decoration too. “I just typed in ‘Idyllwild’ and found all these goofy travel brochures from the 1920s and ’30s,” the publicist says. Some of the vintage pamphlets, now framed and hanging in a hall, tout the respiratory benefits of the resort’s mile-high altitude, which was marketed at the turn of the century as a boon to people afflicted with tuberculosis.
No need to worry. Clifford’s lungs are just fine, thank you, but those crisp mountain breezes are exactly what he craves when it comes time to decompress. Mornings in Idyllwild find him on the porch, usually relaxing in a scarlet Adirondack chair that has been perfectly positioned to take in the landscape, dog by his side. Nothing could be better. As the master of Buck Cottage explains, “A cup of coffee and being surrounded by trees just changes your whole chemistry.”
