Cheerfully bright and budget-appropriate, the three-story Saguaro is a good place for families who want to have a stylish time without succumbing to pretentiousness or the Palm Springs party culture. Despite being successfully run through the design template, furniture feels like 1973 collided with 1953. In-room decor is a funky mismatch of eye-massaging, citrusy oranges and blues standing alongside brown, chunky, thick-slatted handmade Mexican Pigskin Equipale chairs and tables. Some magazines have called it "affordable luxury," but really it's a family hotel with a buzzy central pool and a highly pleasing face-lift by spendy architects Peter Stamberg and Paul Aferiat (the candy-striped bedspreads are on sale in the lobby). If the somewhat dark corridors and motel-ish architecture (all courtyard-facing rooms have a private balcony) ring a bell from vacations of yore, that's because it used to be a Holiday Inn. Happily, the bathrooms are bright and new, unlike what we experienced at the old Holiday Inns. The worst rooms are "City View," which don't show you the mountains, and in the 160s because they face the parking lot, near areas where hotel staff bustles all day long. It's run by Joie de Vivre, a West Coast specialist in stylish hotels that you can afford. Frequent off-season deals bring the rate down to $189 for a Mountain View room.