The Hosts
Farrell & Kelly's Story
Farrell is from Miami. Kelly is from DC. They met waiting tables on the Bowery in New York — two straight-and-narrow types in a restaurant full of actors. One was studying for the bar, the other heading to grad school. They ended up staying in Brooklyn for a decade.
When the pandemic hit, Farrell's sister Kelsey launched a travel magazine called Bucket. Her first issue was entirely about Joshua Tree, Yucca Valley, and Palm Springs. She invited Farrell and Kelly along on a trip to visit her advertisers. They went. They fell hard — for the national park, the Joshua trees, the rock shops, the freewheeling weirdos, the big silence.
They found the house through a widower. Her husband had recently died. She had been a flight attendant her whole life, and she had lived in this home since it was built in the 1980s. She could no longer care for herself. She was grateful that Farrell and Kelly would bring more love to a home where she had known so much.
They renovated it with the help of Farrell's brother-in-law Martin, a member of the architecture collective iThee. They kept the bones, rewrote the rest: hand-set tile, exposed cedar, blush concrete, and the portal wall that now defines the property's identity.
The name comes from Farrell's grandfather Ted, who had a cabin in rural North Carolina he called Nature's Lore. He never explained why. When he passed, the family Googled it — and discovered it's a card in Magic: The Gathering. So naturally, the desert house became Desert's Lore.
