Mark Stefanos
Splash House, Palm Springs’ treasured pool party and after-hours festival, landed with a cannonball last weekend. The festival runs two back-to-back weekends a year — August 8–10 and 15–17 this year. Founded in 2013 by Tyler McLean, Splash House will mark its 25th edition this weekend.
Here’s how it works: the festival takes over the Renaissance, Saguaro and Riviera Hotels, with pool parties from early til dark, shuttling fans between the three. At night, the party goes to the Palm Springs Air Museum for a hangar party til 2 a.m.
The weekend goes nonstop at the pools, on balconies and in hotel rooms, and across Palm Springs at large. The fest features all sorts of mini-experiences on hotel grounds and excursions around Palm Springs as part of their “Field Trip” component.
(Rachel Kupfer)
Factor in the A-list lineup — this year featuring, among many, ACRAZE, Diplo B2B BLOND:ISH, Disco Lines at Weekend 1, and Boys Noize, Cloonee, Disclosure and SOFI TUKKER at Weekend 2 — and you can see how it’s a winning formula that keeps fans coming back year after year.
It’s a completely different festival experience than anything else we have in SoCal, one that emphasizes a breezy, fun-focused attitude fitting for Palm Springs, contrasting the more frenetic energy of other fests.
Tyler McLean was a senior at UCLA when he came up with the idea of Splash House after he saw his hometown of Palm Springs, then a sleepy retirement town, try to lure college kids to spring break with a corny flyer. He sold his parents on the idea, and with his family’s help, threw the first iteration within months. After a successful first year, Goldenvoice came in as a production partner, and the rest is history.
Splash House isn’t just a summer novelty, it’s a major boon for Palm Springs, a town that used to completely shut down in the dog days of summer. It’s estimated the fest generates $15-$20 million in economic activity annually, welcoming about 20,000 attendees who book hotels and spend at local businesses. At its 10-year celebration in 2023, members of the Palm Springs City Council recognized the fest’s impact by declaring August 11 “Splash House Day,” citing the tourism boost and for helping transform the city into a year-round hot spot.
Read on as McLean explains how he built SoCal’s unique, wet and wild weekend experience, and delves into his backstory to reveal that as a member of the Palm Springs High School student council, he even launched a first-of-its-kind rave for eight high schools combined.
This man is a true American party hero!
LA WEEKLY: How did Splash House Weekend 1 go?
Tyler McLean: It was great. A little hot, but that’s to be expected in August. But really just amazing energy all around. We had some really awesome, incredible sets. Disco Lines at the Renaissance was as big as I’ve seen. Really good energy, atmosphere and excitement all around, and nothing but good vibes. So I’m feeling really good about it.
So it was your senior year at UCLA when you came up with this idea?
Yeah, I was graduating college and finished a quarter early and was applying for jobs. I wasn’t expecting to be in the music industry and it just sort of happened that Palm Springs tourism was really making an active push to get young people out to get a new generation of visitors to the city.
They were advertising for spring break on my college campus, which I thought was just crazy. My family was in Palm Springs, so I knew a little bit on the inside of what the general thrust of what the city was trying to achieve.
(Brandon Densley)
I took some inspiration from that and had enough downtime to put pencil to paper and started thinking about, well, if Palm Springs wants to bring out young people, how would you go about that? You can’t just ask people to come and say it’s cool. You have to give people a reason, and you have to create an experience to draw people. And of course, that experience needed to be around music, and it needed to be something that felt authentically Palm Springs also.
If you look at any successful event in Palm Springs, they’re all built on celebrating some cultural asset of what makes Palm Springs unique, right? Whether it’s like golf tournaments, or Modernism Week with the architecture, or it’s the film festival with the connectivity to Hollywood history. All of these events sort of tap into some unique identity of Palm Springs.
That made me think about — well, what about resort pools, with Palm Springs being a capital of poolside leisure and lifestyle, having the most pools per capita in the world?
So I started to build upon the idea of tying multiple resorts together and creating a festival that was music in focus, but also celebrating pools. I really started to believe in it, and my family became invested in this idea, and we just said, let’s go for it, let’s give it a try.
In May or June of that year we pulled the trigger, and by August, we did the show on our own and figured it out along the way.
I had no experience or background in the music industry, but managed to find the right people who connected with the idea and were willing to come on board to support it. We had three different promoters that sort of took over a stage. We had like 600 people come out that first year, and it just felt like we started something special.
Next thing you know, Goldenvoice called, and I’ve been doing it with them in the 11 years since
What were you up to at UCLA? What kind of activities were there, were you throwing parties?
Yeah. I mean, I was in a fraternity. I was certainly throwing parties, and I was promoting some bar nights in Westwood.
In high school, I was on the student council and was throwing events. I came up with this multi-high-school-sanctioned rave, where we created a dance music event and ticketed it across eight different high schools across the city, and it was the first inter-school event.
I guess I just have always had an interest in events and live experiences, and just bringing people together.
The fact that you basically did a “Splash House” and connected eight high schools is absolutely hilarious.
Yeah. No pools. But I guess it was the start of something.
(Tessa Paisan)
It probably wasn’t until I went to Splash House the first time that I started thinking of Palm Springs as being a party place, other than going out for Coachella — and that’s Indio, obviously. It’s funny they were marketing spring break in Palm Springs, what was happening back then?
They wanted college kids back, but their flyers were with this like animated turtle and with a Palm Springs flag, and I just was like, “Oh man, this is bad.”
Spring break was a big thing in Palm Springs from the late 70s through the early 90s before it got shut down because it got too out of control. It was an inflection point where, at that moment, Palm Springs turned away an entire generation of visitors.
The Palm Springs that I grew up in didn’t have the buzziness that you see today, with all the restaurants and cool boutique hotels. It was a dead downtown and t-shirt shops.
When I got to college my freshman year in 2009, that’s when Coachella just crossed the threshold of being a regional music festival to being a global cultural phenomenon. Next thing you know, everyone I know wanted to be at Coachella.
So I think it just so happened that that’s the time that Palm Springs, whether it was Coachella and also the TV show “Mad Men,” and mid-century architecture coming back in vogue, that it started to catch a stride.
But it still wanted young visitors and a new generation. And that’s where I came in. We created a spillover effect demonstrating that Palm Springs is not just about retirement or leisure, but also about live music and cultural experience for people in their 20s and 30s.
We’re also doing this in summer, and Palm Springs, for a really long time, would just completely shut down in summer. But I think that we proved that we can create a premier destination experience in the off-season and be a lifeline for Palm Springs when I think so many people out here need it.
You started in 2013, so it’s been 12 years. How have you grown and scaled, and what lessons have you learned along the way?
The first three to four years was definitely a lot of experimentation, trying to put the right ingredients together to find our audience.
It wasn’t until 2016 that we started events at the Air Museum, for example. The first half of that is just a lot of really patient organic building.
Once we found our foundation audience, we’ve been able to scale the venues, the lineup and the programming, and also the level of production that we’re putting into the experience.
(Mike Kim)
I think people loved the almost renegade, unregulated nature of the show in its early years. As we’re entering year 12, we try to preserve as much of that relaxed, boutique festival feel, and blend that with a premium experience and a really cool production.
Now that we’ve built a pretty awesome team and gotten our hands around the sort of foundation of the show, we’ve been able to start to build the experiences beyond the music.
This year we have educational programs, like a music industry panel happening at the hotels, a DJ academy — a master class on DJ, letting fans work hands-on with mixers. We have wellness events, Frick Frack Blackjack, intimate pop-up sets, and so many immersive, fun experiences.
We’ve been doing DJ Room service and bringing DJs to people’s rooms and we almost did a pop-up set on the Palm Springs Tram, but unfortunately, they had technical difficulties and closed for a week. So just trying to do fun stuff, and trying to make this as much of an amazing immersive experience as it is an amazing party.
What are the field trips all about?
Field trips are what we call for anything that’s happening off-site — an opening session at the Surf Club, we have drag brunch with partners in town. We’re trying to do happy hours at cool venues and trying to bring visibility to venues and businesses that we think are worth highlighting.
We want to sort of be partners and supportive of local businesses beyond just our hotels, of course. So those are the field trips, and we have creative programs which are everything that’s happening on-site.
You’re a Palm Springs born and bred guy. What are some things people should check out outside of the festival when they’re there? Any recs?
Well, funny enough, I did this partnership with Apple Maps where I have this Palm Springs recommendations guide. So, if you’re in Palm Springs, if you pull up Apple Maps, you’ll unfortunately have to see my face with my recommendations.
Checkout Tyler McLean’s Palm Springs Spots here!
With Splash House going strong, where do you go from here?
So long as this is fun and fulfilling for me and for my partners, and as long as there’s a fan base that is loving it, I think that we’re going to continue to do it.
I don’t know how long that is, but for right now, I’m just really enjoying the experience and the process. Being able to build and create and curate physical experiences that people are loving, and taking away these awesome and tangible memories is a pretty cool feeling. It’s just a rewarding, fulfilling thing to be a part of. So, we’ll see, but I’m really enjoying it for now.
Follow Splash House on Instagram at @splashhouse and at splashhouse.com. Interview edited for length and clarity.
(Tessa Paisan)