It all started with an old cabin in a cowboy town

We're Viktor and Meghan. We lived in San Francisco, then New York, and in 2020, during Covid, we moved to Los Angeles with no plan beyond "somewhere with a yard." We started doing weekend trips to Joshua Tree — neither of us had been before — and kept going back. The desert stuck.

Joshua Tree had something hard to beat: a national park with millions of visitors, almost no hotels, and real estate we could actually afford. We bid on 14 houses before we got one. Then we got two at the same time — a three-bedroom house on Roy Rogers Road in Pioneertown, and a boulder-surrounded retreat in Yucca Valley.

Neither of us came from real estate. Meghan had spent years running events in New York — she knows how to make people feel taken care of. Viktor came from tech and design — he thinks in systems and aesthetics. Between the two of us, we had everything except experience. We figured the rest out the hard way.

We redesigned every room of our Pioneertown house from scratch — mixing vintage California furniture with new fixtures, building spaces that feel intentional without feeling precious. The listing went live on a Tuesday and was fully booked by Friday. That was House of Roy, and the Yucca Valley house became House of Kuna. Then came House of Lemons in Los Angeles and House of Funk in Palm Springs, each one designed and run by us.

In 2026 we sold House of Roy to buy an 1894 Victorian in Grass Valley, in California's Gold Country, and we're restoring it into a small hotel: Chapter Eight. The first two rooms are open.

We don't use a property management company. Every house is managed directly by us — with a local team on the ground who knows each property inside and out. If something comes up during your stay, it gets handled. You'll never be passed around or put on hold.

Every property gets the same standard: hot tubs with views, well-equipped kitchens, quality linens, curated vinyl, and the kind of quiet that makes you put your phone down. Each house has its own identity — we design for the feeling you get when you walk through the door, not for a listing thumbnail.

Booking through our site skips Airbnb's fees, which are built into its nightly prices, so the same stay costs less. You pay the nightly rate, a cleaning fee, tax and a small booking fee, and you see the total before you pay. You also get direct communication with us, easier date changes, and first access to new properties and availability.