67589 Hacienda Avenue

Written by: Stephany Wilder / March 2, 2026

In the early 1980s, my family, Ukrainian refugees who built their life and portfolio in Los Angeles through multifamily developments, made a bold decision: to move to Palm Springs and build a hotel from the ground up in Desert Hot Springs, California.

Sunset Inn at 67589 Hacienda Avenue
Desert Hot Springs, CA 92240.

Not a renovation. Not a repositioning. A brand-new structure rising from dirt in a market that hadn’t seen fresh development in years.

The Los Angeles Times covered its opening, noting it was “the first new hotel to be built in nearly 10 years.”

It was a risk.

This was before hotel management companies were plentiful. Before layered advisory teams. There was no third-party operator to step in. It was on the owners.

My family financed it. Built it. Operated it.

They believed passion and effort would carry it forward.

For a time, it did.

But love alone is not infrastructure. Markets shift. Capital tightens. Operating a hotel is more than creating an experience; it’s managing an asset exposed to timing, leverage, and investor pressure.

Years later, they sold the hotel.

And yet, the building still stands. Expanded. Renovated. Still operating as a hotel today.

It exists because someone decided to break ground when others didn’t.

I inherited the hospitality instinct, the belief that experience matters. But I also inherited something deeper: an awareness that vision must be protected.

When I think about revenue strategy, positioning, and asset discipline, it isn’t abstract. It comes from watching something built with heart meet the realities of the market.

My work now is about making sure risks like that have a stronger chance to endure.