Bobby Berk spent eight seasons on Queer Eye walking into other people’s houses and fixing how they felt. On November 2 he launched the version you can book. Camena Collective is a private-estate hospitality brand, and it opens with two houses in Palm Desert, California: Casa Tierra and Casa Mallorca. Neither works like a hotel. Each is booked whole, for one group at a time.
The premise is stated plainly in the launch announcement: a group should have room to be together and space to be alone, in the same house, without choosing between the two. “You shouldn’t have to choose between connection and privacy,” Berk says. It is the argument of his book, Right at Home: How Good Design Is Good for the Mind, turned into a business.
Casa Tierra, the Original
The brand started with one house. Berk found Casa Tierra, a Spanish-style estate in the Cahuilla Hills, in 2021. He kept its original character and layered in custom furnishings and collected objects. It is the smaller of the two, sleeping up to 17 guests across a hacienda and two casitas.
The grounds carry the wellness program: an 1,800-square-foot yoga and meditation deck, a Kohler Wellness sauna and cold plunge, tennis, pickleball, and bocce courts, a theater, a pool, terraced gardens, and a fire pit. Saltillo tile, stained glass, and salvaged architectural details run through the interiors.
Casa Mallorca, the Bigger Swing
Casa Mallorca has 10 bedrooms and sleeps up to 22 guests. The dining numbers tell you what it was built for: 30 guests at the table indoors, 100 outdoors. The chef’s kitchen has four ovens, two dishwashers, and industrial refrigeration. There is a resort-sized pool, a freestanding spa, an indoor movement studio, an outdoor bar, and the same Kohler sauna and cold plunge pairing as Casa Tierra.
The house is essentially off-grid electrically, running on solar panels and battery storage, with landscaping built on native plants and low-use drip irrigation. Both estates stock Flamingo Estate toiletries and Quince linens.
How a Stay Works
There is no programming calendar. Groups book one of three tiers: Venue Only, Venue + Culinary, or Fully Programmed, and the house builds the stay around them. The Fully Programmed tier can fold in yoga, meditation, breathwork, sound healing, massage, and sauna and cold plunge sessions. The culinary program works with female chefs and female-owned companies, a detail worth noting in an industry that rarely specifies. Weddings are taken as full-estate buyouts, welcome party to morning-after brunch, all on one property.
Camena Collective does not publish nightly rates. Stays are quoted per group, per tier, and per estate, through camenacollective.com. That is the honest answer on price, and for whole-estate buyouts it is also the normal one.
The name comes from the Camenae, Roman goddesses of springs, poetry, and song, who kept a sacred spring outside the city where people went to be restored. Berk chose desert houses for it: two estates named for water spirits, in the driest light in California, where the pool and the plunge are the whole point.
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