Palm Springs design panel rejects storage facility’s facade, sends plans back for revision

The Palm Springs Architectural Review Committee (ARC) this week sent design plans for a proposed self-storage facility at 900 North Farrell Drive back to the applicant for further changes. 

The Planning Commission approved plans for a 92,400-square-foot, two-story self-storage building with 52 outdoor RV parking spaces in late April. The Planning Commission approved the project with a few conditions, including directing the applicant to tweak the project’s landscaping and architecture to better suit Palm Springs. 

The project applicant, Legacy Built Investments & Development, LLC, presented revised design plans on Monday that portrayed a simpler structure with cleaner lines and softer colors than the original renderings, which had featured horizontal striping, darker brown color tones and corrugated metal. Those features, while “very common features for storage buildings, weren’t really Palm Springs,” said a representative of Legacy Built Investments & Development on Monday. 

“A lot of jurisdictions want you to make your storage building look like an office building, they want you to make it look like it’s a building that people are interacting with in a way that they’re actually not, so that’s why a lot of modern storage buildings are designed that way,” said the applicant. “But we were advised to have the building be softer in the background and just kind of recede into the background.” 

Committee members said the new plans generally moved in the right direction, but expressed concern that they couldn’t fully consider the plans because the applicant didn’t have sufficient time between the Planning Commission and Architectural Review Committee meetings to complete a full set of new renderings. Committee members also took issue with what the applicant described as a key feature of self-storage buildings: a glass window cut-out in the front of the building, which displays a few of several brightly colored roll-up self-storage unit doors. 

The project applicant said this design feature serves as a key signifier for people driving by that the facility is a self-storage building, and essentially serves as an advertisement. Committee members, meanwhile, felt that the glass window display threw off the symmetry of the building, among other issues. The display is also fake; it doesn’t actually show the inside of the self-storage building. 

“I can’t think of it as anything other than like a penalty box or broadcast booth hanging off the side of the building with some fake roll-up windows behind, it just rubs me the wrong way,” said one committee member. “It may be done a lot to announce the use of the building, but it seems like a low-effort solution. I find it problematic.” 

Committee members ultimately voted to send the project back to the applicant for further study, and will reconsider the proposal at a later date. 

The project is one of a growing number of self-storage facilities in Palm Springs, mostly located on the other side of the airport along Gene Autry Trail. While the 900 North Farrell Drive continues to make its way through the city’s approval process, Palm Springs is also considering changing how it considers self-storage facilities, including potentially capping the size of new facilities. 

---