hotelHotel Impossible · Season 2, Episode 8 · Aired February 11, 2013
Curve Hotel
Palm Springs, California
This one survived. It remains in business.
What happened after
Listed on Trivago with a July 2026-dated entry and referenced in a recent critical review ('a budget wanna be boutique gone bad', 150 rooms) as an operating property; no official hotel-owned site located.
What happened on the show
Palm Springs, a desert town synonymous with midcentury cool and boutique-hotel design, was exactly the market where a property could not afford to fake it, and the Curve was Melchiorri's cautionary example. Pitched as a boutique hotel of roughly 150 rooms, it was the kind of place trying to project style it had not fully earned, competing in a city full of genuinely designed properties. Anthony's read on a would-be boutique in a design-obsessed market was that the gap between the pitch and the product is fatal, so he worked the rooms, the public spaces, and the guest experience for exactly that gap. He pushed ownership to either deliver the boutique stay it advertised or reposition honestly, because in Palm Springs a budget hotel wearing boutique clothing gets found out fast. The fix was about closing the distance between what the Curve claimed to be and what a guest actually got.
After the cameras left
The Curve appears to still be operating in Palm Springs, though the picture is not flattering. As of our 2026 check it carried a current listing on a major travel aggregator and turned up in a recent critical review that described it, unkindly, as a budget property reaching for a boutique identity it never achieved and counted roughly 150 rooms. We could not locate a hotel-owned official site and are logging the status as confirmed operating with medium confidence on aggregator and review sourcing. Last confirmed active in 2026, a recheck candidate for firmer citation.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.