He had been told about it by his close friend, the composer Jimmy Van Heusen, who had stopped for fuel there while flying to Los Angeles.

Fellow acquaintances of Sinatra's who had also started frequenting Palm Springs in the 1940s included Lana Turner and Dinah Shore, and the actress Ava Gardner who was to become his second wife.

[3] On 1 May 1947 Sinatra walked into the offices of E. Stewart Williams, wearing a white sailor cap and eating an ice cream cone, and requested that the firm build him a Georgian style house as a weekend residence; he had recently signed a film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and had made his first $1 million.

Williams's brother and architectural partner, Roger, later said that he was "so glad" that Sinatra chose the modern design, believing that "We'd have been ruined if we'd been forced to build Georgian in the desert".

[8] Twin Palms is a single-story residential building, 4,500sq ft in size with 4 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms, constructed around long horizontal lines framed with steel and aluminum and windows that stretch to the ground.