Ron's Log

Kaufmann House Goes For $15 Million Plus

Neutra's Kauffman house in Palm Springs was sold at Christie's last night for $15 million. The identity of the buyer has not been revealed. In the N.Y. Times article about the entire auction (including a Rothko that went for $50.4 million) an additional sale of $2.1 million is reported:

After the sale, Marc Porter, Christie's president in America, said the buyer, whom he declined to name, exercised an option to purchase an orchard adjacent to the property for an additional $2.1 million that includes three cacti that were a present from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mr. Kaufmann on his first visit to the home.

Kaufmann House On The Block Tomorrow

The Kaufmann House by Neutra will be auctioned on Tuesday, May 13 by Christies. Maybe they will get the $25 million they have been talking about. The auction begins at 4 PM (Pacific Time) and will be televised live in the Annenberg Theater of the Palm Springs Art Museum for museum members. Also on the block will be works by Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko, and Roy Lichtenstein. You may have heard of them.

Photo by aprilbaby.

A Change On Palm Drive

Word comes to me that this landmark/eyesore midcentury modern gas station on Palm Drive will be torn down within about two weeks. Those who object are welcome to rush in with the thousands required to restore it to other-than-eyesore quality.

Escrow Closed On Lautner Motel

Escrow closed April 25 on the Lautner Motel (AKA, the "Desert Hot Springs Motel"), designed by John Lautner. Final selling price was $425,000. The new owners, Tracy Beckmann and Ryan Trowbridge promise a swimming pool in the future.

My set of photos of the Lautner Motel can be seen here.

UPDATE: In response to Tomm's question about the condition of the exterior of the place I took a drive by the Lautner Motel this afternoon and walked around the perimeter taking photos. You can get to them by following this link or these thumbnails:

Cut-Rate Marmol Radziner

Marmol Radziner will be launching a new line of prefab homes that will be 20% to 25% less expensive than current models. I never knew the Marmol Radziner was in famed Vernon, California, the industrial city. The linked article has several photos from the factory.

Elevator Story

Two parts to this story, and you can start with whichever you prefer:

- A well-written (as always) New Yorker article all about elevators, including the story of Nicholas White who was trapped alone in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill building in 1999 for 41 hours.

- The time-lapse video from the elevator's own security camera of Nicholas White's 41 hours of entrapment. That's on YouTube and is only 3:11 long.

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Hurd House

We come to the very last house on the modern home tour, the Hurd house, which is on the Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage at 37380 Marx Road. I'm almost reluctant to show you the photos of this house because I think they can feed the "golf course syndrome." The golf course syndrome is something that may exist only in my imagination, but this how I imagine it works: Some middle-class couple working their way up through life in some part of the world where things like snow, humidity and flying insects are constant nuisances, entertain themselves by leafing through Better Homes & Gardens or Architectural Digest admiring those over-saturated color photos of beautiful places where they might take their nest egg and retire. Repeatedly, one's eyes are drawn to the images of country club retirement living: great swaths of perfect, green grass lying under an endlessly perfect blue sky, framed by sharp, dramatic mountains. Amidst that the magazine photo shows a strikingly designed home where, on the verandah, we see the happy, gray-haired owners serving chilled cocktails in colorful glasses to a few stylishly dressed, well-tanned friends who are lounging about on all sorts of poolside furniture. In the background of the shot, slightly out of focus, are a few golfers standing around their golf carts. In short, Palm Springs.

So one member of the couple says to the other "Oh, darling, this is where we must retire - to a country club in Palm Springs." "But sweetums," the other one replies, "we don't play golf!" to which the first one replies "Who cares sugar, maybe we can learn. Just look at this! Oh, honey, I must have it." And they can afford it, so five, ten, fifteen years down the road there they are, just like the people in the magazine photo. They never took up golf, but they've got a tan, and some large chunk of their country club dues go to pump a gigantic amount of water out of the aquifer to spray it across the greens that lie around their home, so that the happy couple can take photos of themselves to send to friends they left back in snow country to make them jealous so that they, too, can buy a country club home here.

But that's just my theory to partially explain why we have so very many golf courses here with so very few players on them.

Anyway, the Hurd house, country club living. If you want to retire that way, get here soon.

It's a real party house; probably the real estate people would say it's designed for entertaining. The owners celebrated the place by letting us go without our booties, to actually use the toilets in the house, and to enjoy drinks from the bar and food from a little buffet in the kitchen.

The central axis of the house seems to be a small, internal courtyard with a fountain, surrounded by glass walls on all four sides. Overhead may have been originally open to the sky, but it's covered by shade cloth now. On the four sides of this courtyard are the entrance to the house, the swimming pool area, the "formal" (the biggest, anyway) living room, and the formal dining area. Beyond those areas are more glass walls to the outside, so the effect is glass-on-glass throughout. Here's what our tour booklet says about the house:

Designed by C.H. Barlund and built in 1967, the Hurd House, so named for the original owner, F. E. Hurd, is a fine example of Desert Modern; Barlund, a Finnish architect, also designed the 1967 Dillman House at 40780 Thunderbird Road, Rancho Mirage. In the Hurd House he has combined the design simplicity of Desert Modern with touches of the luxe formalism of International Style to create an exceptional example of the Rancho Mirage country club esthetic.

Situated on almost an acre (.93 acres to be exact), the 6,178 sq. ft. L-shaped Hurd house contains a swimming pool in the courtyard with southerly views to the seventh fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club golf course. Just two fairways over (on the 17th to be precise) is the 1957 house designed by William Cody for Frank Sinatra. Other neighbors included the Marx brothers, Jack Benny and Red Skelton.

The flat roof and slender fascia raised on thin posts dematerialize the house, an effect intensified by the reflection of the landscape in the long band of floor to ceiling windows and sliders, so that you feel you are looking through rather than into the structure. Simple design choices often carry significant consequences and this effect of dematerialization is one of them. Compare the relation of the Hurd overhang resting atop the posts with Cody's design for Abernathy. There the architect chose to suspend the roofline from the posts (not unlike Mies' decision to 'hang' the Farnsworth from steel beams) which adds a dramatic delineation between porch and patio. Barlund chose instead to de-empathize [sic?] the role of the posts - they appear less to offer support than to articulate a rhythmic progression around the three-sided courtyard. Neither roof nor posts prevail here, all is a comfortable stasis. The treatment resembles that Cody used on the
aforementioned Goldberg House on Southridge.

The wide eaves shade a deep patio that runs on all three sides of the courtyard; the long southern side was originally screened. Most of the rooms of the original 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath, design open to this covered area with a view of the pool. The pool, partially nestled in the two projecting wings, projects beyond them leading your attention to views of the fairway and the mountains in the distance.

The new owners purchased the house in 2006, falling in love with the expansive lot, the extensive glass, the wide overhangs and the Hollywood history of Tamarisk Country Club.

The house had not been much changed from its original 1967 iteration, though it had suffered some from lack of maintenance. The new owners sought to accomplish a sensitive restoration with only the kitchen receiving significant alterations. For the rest of the house, it was a case of 'spit and polish' to restore the glamor. Having originally purchased the house with the intention of 'flipping it', the owners instead fell victim to its -- quite evident -- charms, captivated now by the light and vistas from every room.

For the Hurds and now enjoyed by our twenty-first century owners, Barlund* designed a simple stylish hallmark in perfect harmony with the gracious life style of the storied country club and golf course surrounding it.

The house is a testament to another time when Hollywood's stars wandered the desert landscape, golfed with the great, partied with peers, drank until dawn, while the rest of us, daydreamed, the thoroughly-thumbed copy of the latest Photoplay dangling deliriously at our slumbering side.

[*Note that the house has been attributed to the firm of Patten & Wild; information on them has proven impossible to come by. The plans in the possession of the current owners, while including the name Patten & Wild, do show that the plans were drawn by CH Barlund, S.A.F.A. As the recognized architect of at least one other Rancho Mirage house, Barlund is likely a better attribution. There is no record of either a Patten or a Wild at AIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.]

Go here to see all my photos of the Hurd house or here to see photos from all eight houses on the tour. These are a sample:

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Menrad House

The penultimate house on the modern home tour was the Menrad house at 1070 Apache in Palm Springs. You can see all my photos of the Menrad house here, and all my photos from this tour here. These are some of the Menrad house:

Here's the description of the Menrad house from the tour booklet:

The Menrad House

The Alexander Company, run by father and son George and Bob Alexander, were tract homebuilders in the San Fernando Valley. In 1955, they hired a young architectural team; Dan Palmer and William Krisel to design a tract in the San Fernando Valley called Corbin Palms. These were of a modern design and sold well and made the company more money than traditional designs.

In 1956, Bob Alexander decided that there was too much competition for homebuilders in the San Fernando Valley and he decided to look to Palm Springs. Their first project here was the Ocotillo Lodge and it too was designed by Palmer and Krisel. The hotel was located in front of what would become the Twin Palms Neighborhood. After the hotel was finished, they decided to try a small tract of homes behind Ocotillo. Palm Springs was a place of custom vacation homes, so this was really a new concept for the desert. Mr. Krisel had just completed his own custom home in Brentwood, which Bob Alexander really liked. The Alexanders specified that certain things in this new home also be incorporated into the tract houses then under consideration for Palm Springs. So lots of clerestory windows, an atrium in the master bedroom and the post and beam construction technique were incorporated into the new project.

In 1957 the first homes were completed. Even though the floor plans were essentially all the same 40 x 40 foot square, the different rooflines, rotation of the home on the lot and unique exterior finishes gave the homes a custom look. There was no brochure and no advertisement ever created, but the homes sold like hot cakes, many to guests of the Ocotillo. They were priced at around the $30,000 range, which was not particularly cheap for the time and many of the buyers were doctors, lawyers, successful people in entertainment and other captains of industry. This was their first taste of desert resort living, and many would move on to more elaborate custom homes around golf courses. However, Palmer and Krisel were the first ones to create in Palm Springs a modern, custom-like tract that was appreciated by the buyer and profitable for the builder. With Twin Palms, the Alexanders started something that would forever change the face of Palm Springs. Their work, and that of other builders such as Fey and Meiselman, who replicated their concept of the clean lined modern tract home, caused a rapid increase in the population of the city during the post-war period.

The Alexander Company went on to build many more homes in Palm Springs, with Palmer and Krisel and other architects as well. Later examples no longer included the atrium. And to lower the costs, the HVAC, which was unique at that time for combining heating and air and dueling it through the foundation, (an article on this pioneering system was written in Progressive Architecture) moved from the foundation slab into soffits which had the effect of lowering entry and hall ceilings and changing the overall open effect of the original design. After many years of neglect, these homes are now beloved icons of the desert.

This example of a Palmer and Krisel home was built in the first of three tracts of homes, originally called Smoketree Valley Estates, now known as Twin Palms. This house is mostly in original condition. The kitchen, which was originally enclosed, had been remodeled in the 1980's. It has since been re-imagined and designed by architectural designer Phillip K. Smith using a Julius Shulman photograph of the original P & K design as a guide. The bathrooms have had the cabinetry rebuilt as originally designed. Ninety percent of the furniture seen in the house today was available for purchase at the time the house was built. William Krisel, also a landscape architect, designed the front landscaping in 2006.

Fullerton Fox Theater

While walking around Fullerton my eyes were drawn to old, closed Fox Theatre. Light wasn't good for me to get much in the way of photos, but here are three:

Came home and Googled it and found its own website where I saw that occasionally movies are projected on the outside back wall of the building, which explained the marquee announcing movies. I tried to imagine how they could pack a crowd inside a structurally unsound building.

Here Paul McElligott has photos taken of the interior of the building, and if you follow this search you'll find more photos of the Fox Theatre in Fullerton.

The theater was built in 1925 and renamed the Fox Theatre in 1930. It was closed and abandoned in 1987. It got local landmark status in 1990 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in October 2006.

Here's the L.A. Times story on the theater's restoration. $9 million has been raised to pay for it, but the project remains a whopping $17 million short of its goal! The city of Fullerton has made $3 million available. City Councilmember Richard Jones sounds like a practical man with hardly a crumb of romance in his soul:

Councilman Richard Jones, the only council member to vote against the loan, said he didn't understand why the city should pour any more money into the Fox.

"I want this to fly. It could be a crown jewel for our city that people would gather around," Jones said.

"But I don't want it to suck the city's resources. I don't want to keep spending money on something that could be the Titanic."

Jones questions whether restoring a structure built in 1925 is worth the large investment.

"I know a lot of people would scream, holler and cry if we tore down this 1920s theater," he said.

"But if you take a bulldozer and start from scratch, it wouldn't take nearly as much to build and you could still make it look like the traditionalists want it to look."

The foundation that owns the theater hopes to have it restored for a grand re-opening in 2010. "Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, both Fullerton natives, have expressed interest in performing at the opening, according to reports."

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - J. Porter Clark House

Oh no, I didn't forget the modern home tour. We still have three houses to look at. I hope you've been taking notes, because there will be a rigorous exam when we finish!

The fifth house on the tour was the J. Porter Clark house at 1200 Paseo El Mirador, Palm Springs. We weren't allowed to go inside this house, either due to its delicate state, or our hefty weight. Here are a few pics:

You can see all my photos of the J. Porter Clark house here.

Here's what the tour organizers told us about the Clark house:

The Clark Residence

By the end of the 1930's the population of Palm Springs had more than tripled, from a little over 1,000 people in 1930 to about 3,400. That staggering growth rate was accompanied by a great burst of Modernism by the end of the decade. The Kocher-Samson Building, by Albert Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher, was completed in 1934 (760 N. Palm Canyon Drive). Completed in 1937, the Grace Miller House is a diminutive temple for perfervid believers in that apodictic modernist deity, architect Richard Neutra. (Really, who's more infallible, Neutra or the pope? Rest assured that the true Holy Trinity is, incontrovertibly, Mies, Kahn and Corbu.)

Then in 1939 came the irresistibly winsome house designed and built by John Porter dark, a bold metal and glass aerie poised on the slightest of daringly canted piers, mid-air over a desert landscape, his first bachelor home and then family home, enjoyed until he died in 1990.

When you look at the house today, you must reconstruct it in stages. Look initially at only the simple two story structure, eliminating everything to the east, including the rain guard over the stairs, for that was the starting point. What a perfect volume it is, perhaps 800 sq. ft. of living space; the upstairs comprised the living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath. The living room opened to the the east balcony with large windows to the south and east, ribbon windows on the north. The bedroom, (now the dining room) opened to the west with captivating views of the mountains. A small galley kitchen shared the line of ribbon windows on the north side as did the bathroom (sacrificed in a later remodel to enlarge the kitchen).

Below these enveloping spaces was the carport and a covered porch (where today you can see the Mexican fetish spirits of J. P. and Louisa dark hanging on the wall in appropriate filial devotion.) It is easy to picture the real Clarks on the balcony in the late afternoon, the hot sun behind the house to the west, a breeze across the desert ruffling the leaves of that great American elm (alive even today though struggling; sad to report, its twin, which stood just to the east, died just five years ago; the carcass recently removed, after it toppled over in the wind).

The Clark's lot was carved from acreage that had been part of the El Mirador Hotel property, illustrious in the 1920's, bankrupted in 1932 due to the depression, then purchased and re-glamorized by Warren Pinney. Two other owners were offered the same opportunity to build on the old property; they were, fanfare with drum roll for Modernist deity worshippers, Albert Frey, who built his radical Frey I here in 1940; and E. Stewart Williams, who built his own mesmeric residence here in 1956.

Then as now, a small patch of grass enveloped the dark house, seemingly holding the desert at bay; the current homeowners " Clark's youngest son, his wife and their three daughters, residents since 1991" are working to restore the desert landscape, hence the request that you not cross it to reach the house, but follow the outlines of the old driveway. Cars entering the property followed that curve to the gravel car park area by the carport. There was no pool then, it came in 1980. Only the pristine metal building rising from the contained plot of green, that slash of red deck an aggressive structural irruption or a provocative come-up-and-see-me-sometime.

As you look inside the living room from the balcony, note the original hi-fi cabinet and globe lamp; the Eames chairs and the lamps by the couch are original to the house. Carpeting covers what was the original maroon linoleum floor.

With children came pressures for expansion; and the solution, as devised by dark, was quite simple: a series of three bedrooms in a one story wing attached only by the rhythmic reach of that dramatically suspended rain guard. Thus the bedrooms were added in 1946, an unprepossessing but extremely comfortable one-room deep structure that looks like the wake to the two story ship in front of it. (The storage area was added in 1972).

Note that on the upper level the corrugation is aligned vertically; on the ground level it is horizontal, a simple trick to heighten the verticality of the upper structure and increase the visual impact of the lower without overbuilding the footprint.

The flat planes of glass and corrugated metal separating bedrooms from living area act less as connecting planes than as an artful articulation of interior and exterior, where exterior is the new entry court to the north. The 'front door' is that glass slider that lets you 'in' off the covered porch with its long cantilever supported by that totally improbable steel pipe. It's like walking into a one-walled atrium, a very expansive atrium.

If you walk out the 'front door' to the new entry court on the north side of the house, note that the fountain was added in 1966. Looking at the early structure, you can see where a stair came down the side from the entrance balcony. That stair was removed and the new stair added to the west of the house to provide access to the dining area and kitchen when the house was enlarged in 1946.

Apple - Fifth Avenue

I didn't get a chance to visit the Soho location, but I think if you're goal is serious shopping for an Apple product, the 14th Avenue location is better than the famous Fifth Avenue location. OTOH, if you want 24-hour, 365-day borging to the anti-christ, that would be Fifth Avenue. I did breeze through a couple of times to briefly check email. Carlton and I hit the 14th Avenue store to play with a MacBook Air and an iPhone. Hey, howthafuck do you close a window or go back when using Safari on an iPhone? I couldn't figure it out.

BTW, has anyone visited the Chinese factory where they're churning out these glass spiral staircases?

Inside The Metropolitan Opera House

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Sieroty House

Next on our tour of homes was the Sieroty house at 695 Vereda Sur, Palm Springs. Here's the info from our tour booklet:

During 1938, Mr. and Mrs. Julian Sieroty brought their family to vacation in Palm Springs. They rented a house and fell in love with the desert. That house was the Halberg house, and it was designed and built in 1936 by Albert Frey. Mr. Sieroty had purchased some property three blocks away from the rental house and asked Mr. Frey to replicate the house on his lot.

Though the Halberg House is completely altered, the Sieroty House, its twin, is fortunately here for us to view today. To quote from Rosa, "Frey designed a planar roof that extended over the volume of the house and carport to shield the windows from the sun. The volume of the house was broken up in elevation by the articulation of the fireplace and windows."

For its time, this house was very avant-garde. This house was completed in 1941 and was celebrated with a Thanksgiving dinner to which Albert Frey was invited. This house is a wonderful example of Frey's early desert work which was done primarily in the moderne style. At the time, the house stood alone in the landscape. Albert Frey was a great colorist and the original rental house was a bit more daring in the use of interior colors. Beth Meltzer says that each wall was a different color and her parents were not quite ready for that. However you will see some of Frey's influence in the current color schemes of the bedrooms. The house has very large windows in the living room, unusual for the time but influenced by the modern notion of bringing outdoors in. This allowed Frey to capture views of the surrounding dunes and the mountains in the distance. The family did not spend much time at the house in the early years, as naval personnel working at the nearby hospital that had been converted from the El Mirador Hotel occupied it.

After the war, the house was enjoyed for many years by the Sieroty family and many friends and relations. With time, the living room glass walls were extended out to the edge of the covered patio and made into sliders and a staircase to a rooftop sunbathing deck was removed. In the 1950's, Chester "Cactus Slim" Moorten was commissioned to do the cactus garden and brought in many of the boulders seen on the property. The pool was added as well.

As time went on, however, the family's use of the house decreased. By the 1980s, Beth Meltzer says the house had gone to seed. Beth and her brother Alan, who had inherited the property, decided to restore it. They wondered if Albert Frey was still around. They decided to give him a call and to their delight, he was very willing to help them with the project. By 1989, the restoration was complete and was celebrated with a Thanksgiving dinner to which Frey was again invited. This house, perfectly preserved, is a wonderful capsule of a time gone by when Palm Springs was all about horseback riding and tennis and the post-war boom of mid-century tract homes was still 15 years away.

All my photos of the Sieroty house can be seen here. This is a link to the collection of all my photos from the tour. Here are some of my photos of the Sieroty house:

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Saving A Frey?

Here we have a visiting Cantabrigian excitedly surveying Albert Frey's yacht club building at North Shore in anticipation of Riverside County's turning it into a community center!

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Abernathy House

After strengthening ourselves with a healthy lunch, we all descended on the Abernathy House at 611 Phillips Road, Palm Springs. Here's what our booklet told us about the house (slightly edited):

In the Abernathy House, 1962, built for Ralph Abernathy and his second wife, Madge Phillips, William F. Cody eschews the tight rectilinear classicism of Goldberg in favor of a loosely woven fabric of sumptuous pavilions, a compound of organic perfection.

The house is a beauty. It has all of the Cody touches that we expect, the impossibly attenuated line of the colonnade fascia. The slump stone, pure white; its robust horizontality the antithesis of the strict grey verticality of the wood siding. The formality of the forecourt. The simple pavilion-hipped roof lines, most perfectly expressed in the car shelter, undulating across the grounds with rigorous discipline.

If Frey and Wexler thrust wall planes past the habitable footprint making a visual claim to the outside, Cody is much more controlled here. Outside is out there, in here is inside; they meet at the physical envelope but they don't intermingle; with Cody, even when walls are glass and slide open, you know when you're inside and when you're not. He is a master of envelopment, of engendering comfort and security. In Cody's work, there is a physical articulation of sense of place, belongingness, an affinity, in the purely biochemical meaning translated into architecture. He makes a house a home, no matter how princely. Perhaps only a man like Cody who spent his nights cultivating his hard-earned reputation for 'carousal' could understand the intricacies of translating roof and wall into sanctity.

Cody is expert at creating significant shifts in dimension and purpose with a bravura subtlety. You'll experience that in the Abernathy House as you move from pavilion to pavilion, these virtuoso shifts in scale: width to length, height to width, glassy porosity to dense enclosure, ardently public to raptly private, all of it wildly theatrical. Each purpose is expressed not as room but as pavilion, as pure theater, life lived in a series of interconnected sets, each defined by the boundaries of its own hipped roof. Even the pool terrace, where imagined pavilions appear to shelter its shifting levels, seems to follow suit.

The living room pavilion is clearly not illusory. With polished terrazzo floors covering its thirty foot square area and topped by a twenty-six foot ceiling, the central living room pavilion is the focal point from which all the other pavilions project.

This is an easy house to love. The current owner, very protective of his jewel, has lavished an affectionate restoration on it; the Abernathy House is anew the gem it should have always been.

Go here to see all of my photos of the Abernathy house. This is a link to all of my photos from this tour. What follows are some sample images of the Abernathy house:

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Russell House

Third on the modern home tour was the Russell House at 660 Palisades Drive, Palm Springs. This is behind and 200 feet higher than the museum. There was a shuttle van, but some of us walked the steep driveway to get up there.

The description of the house tells us that there were three different owners named Russell, but it doesn't say if they were related. I have edited this text from the tour booklet a little to remove some unnecessary, uninformative weirdness:

Sited 200 breath-taking feet above the valley floor, the Russell House was built in 1959 for Russell who was a jobber, digging oil wells in Long Beach for Standard Oil. Eventually, he went bust after building here and moved to Hawaii.

Russell had the distinction of having the first of the three houses that are located on this side of the mountain -- of course, the O'Donnell House on the east face of the mountain (directly above the Museum) was the first, designed by architect Charles Tanner, built in 1925 by Nellie Coffman, a founder of Palm Springs and owner of the then world-famous Desert Inn, for oil magnate Thomas O'Donnell.

From 1977 to 1982 the house was home to Allen Carr, famous as producer of the 1978 film Grease and 1984 Tony winning producer of Broadway's La Cage aux Folles.

The next owner was Douglas A. Russell, with Boise Cascade affiliations, for whom Frey designed the sunshades, based on plans dated Nov 30, 1982, and revised Dec 8, 1982. Douglas Russell held the house until placing it on the market in 2004.

The current owners first saw the house in 2004 just as they entered escrow on another house in Las Palmas. Though the site was overgrown, they decided on first sight to buy it. Restoration of the pool, based on Frey drawings, was the first project. That wonderful sand beach that slips down into the waters of the pool and the spillover were Frey's casual genius at work. In his day the technology was not so well developed to create these, but the owners scrupulously followed his design and adopted current technology to bring Albert's pool design to extraordinary life. The update was completed a year later in the fall of 2005, at which point they could turn to restoration of the house. That work required 18 months, and the owners moved into the finished house in late November 2007.

Renovations were made with every luxury available. The current front door, a single plate of glass that pivots open automatically replaced a fixed-pane of glass. Elsewhere double-pane glass replaced the environmentally inefficient single-pane glass. In the living room, the renovation included replacing one set of sliders with a fixed glass plate, and added glass to both sides of the southeast corner to heighten the floating roof effect - structural necessity obviated the desire to butt the glass edges at that corner without a structural member, but the existing structural element is narrow enough in profile to lend the illusion credence.

The brightly colored canopies shading the east exposure are true to Frey's 1982 concept. At some point that iteration was replaced by a single cover across the entire span, which idea proved foolhardy when a gust of wind removed the canopy and the supporting wooden beams. In the renovation, steel beams on the exterior, painted to match the interior wood, are tied into the structure and support the three laced awnings as Frey had shown in his 1982 plan. The result is an interesting and curvaceous contrapunto set against the emphatic linearity of the exterior.

Inside feels refreshingly outside at the Russell House. In a close 1,700 sq. ft. the air inside the house seems to breathe with the stirring air beyond the planes of glass. The hinted tint of orange drifts from the canopies through the living room like zest in a souffle; the air is suffused with a view tumbling into ripples from the pool and falling into the horizon over the water's edge pulling your senses outward and downward; you feel out-of-body as a part of you skirts the tops of palms 200 feet below.

In the Russell House, the view is given over to the living room; the boulder here is outside, languishing in the shallows of the pool; resisting the tug of water tippling over the edge; it caroms the sight lines toward the southeast and away from the mountain. From any vantage point on the patio you are drawn to the view.

The current owners have worked hard to strengthen your power to resist a little bit by providing a palette of furnishings certain to keep you occupied with the interior. A one-of-a-kind Milo Baughman sofa set with coffee table paired with Taraxacum Castiglioni hanging lamps from the 40's compete wholeheartedly for your attention. The set of six modular Panton light panels in white fiberglass is to be remarked on as well; as are the Mans Wegner stacking chairs surrounding the Hans Wegner designed dining table, all under the Verner Panton V Globe lamp. With those two Milo Baughman couches positioned so perfectly for reveling in the sight of the valley beyond, it is inevitable, the view wins. It is quite wonderful.

The master bedroom is at the west end of the house and is both a comfortable space protected from the earliest morning light and a perfect backdrop to the current owners collected modern vintage pieces. Note the McCobb chest on Lucite stand; the Frank Lloyd Wright rug from the Arizona Biltmore and the 1952 rosewood Eames chair with ottoman. The bed is a Herman Miller Thin-edge with matching pedestal night stands.

The master bath was enlarged by eliminating a narrow hallway on the south side and opening the north wall of the shower area to the outdoors, incorporating dual sinks on opposite walls and an enclosed WC.

The den functions doubly as guest room with a queen size bed hidden in sthe custom-designed wall unit and shows off an Eero Saarinen cabinet. The kitchen has been thoroughly modernized and vested with hand rubbed wax finish walnut cabinets.

All my photos of the Russell House can be found here. The complete set of my photos from the tour are here. These are some of them:

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Stewart/Dyer House

The second house on the tour of modern homes was the Stewart/Dyer House at 1210 Los Robles, Palm Springs. Here's what our booklet told us about the house:

After the success of the Twin Palms subdivision in the south end of town, the Alexander Construction company decided in 1958 to develop a tract of land to the west of Old Las Palmas. Now know as Vista Las Palmas, it was originally called Las Palmas Estates. They would again offer the three bedroom designs which Palmer and Krisel worked out for Twin Palms, as well as a P & K designed four-bedroom model. However, they also wanted to offer a more traditional, ranch style home, which they felt, was needed to accommodate a higher end market.

Since Palmer and Krisel did not do traditional homes, these were given to Charles Dubois, about which little is known. He did incorporate some of their design elements, such as the sun flap on some models and the effect of post and beam construction in the living room, but for the most part, these were more traditional homes with soffit ceilings throughout and traditional rooflines which allowed for better insulation and the potential for year-round living. His one dramatic gesture was a model with a large A-frame at the entry which was inserted into a more traditional house and which is now know as the "Swiss Miss". Like Palmer and Krisel, all the floor plans of the Dubois designs were essentially the same, with the lanai being occasionally enclosed to create a fourth bedroom and the exteriors displaying a range of finishes which gave these 3 or 4 bedroom homes a custom look.

The owners of this home, who are in the interior design field, have lovingly restored this particular example. The front of the home is enclosed by a wonderful screen of slatted wood and decorative concrete block, which keeps the house cool in the desert heat, while allowing peeks to the mountains beyond and gives a Moorish feel to this semi-outdoor space. There were few homes in the neighborhood with this unique treatment. Another can be seen just up the street on the opposite side.

The interior is a wonderfully eclectic selection of furnishings and art with careful attention to even the most minute detail and color. The color scheme of yellows, turquoises and greens and much of the furniture is evocative of design in the late 1960s, and early 1970s. Some items to note are the Lalanne designed frog and hippo sculptures which double as furniture, the Jim Iserman painting in the living room and the carefully planted architectural pottery arrayed around the swimming pool. There are several paintings by Shag in the television lounge and throughout the home there is wonderful art and furniture by such names as Tobia Scarpa, Gino Sarfatti, Saarinen, Paul Evans, Steven Meisel and Gabriella Crespi. In fact, many of the pieces of furniture selected by the owners were designed by fashion designers such as the black and white coffee table in the living room by Crespi for Dior. There are several pieces by Pierre Cardin scattered throughout the home as well.

The collection of art and furniture is from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s and represents a progression of modernism through the decades. The owner's home perfectly integrates art, architecture and design into the Palm Springs lifestyle.

You can see all of my photos of the Stewart/Dyer house here. This is a link to all of my photos from the tour.

These are some of the Stewart/Dyer photos:

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Wexler House

Yesterday I went on a tour of eight midcentury modern homes (7 in Palm Springs, 1 in Rancho Mirage) that was organized by the Palm Springs Modern Heritage Fund. I believe it was done by The Palm Springs Modern Committee in previous years. Same people, I imagine, but organized differently for tax purposes.

It's the first time I've done this tour, having missed it in previous years either due to schedule conflicts or just because it's expensive - $125 this year.

So let's get my little gripes out of the way: we all have to drive ourselves around to the eight houses, and each house is open for only an hour or hour and a half. Tickets bought in advance give us only the address of the first house, the Wexler House at 1272 East Verbena Drive in Palm Springs where we pick up the booklet that lists all eight houses. While I waited for access to the Wexler House I flipped quickly through the guide. The list of houses and their addresses was easy to find, but where is the map, the directions? My fear is that this is some sort of taxi drivers test and we're all just supposed to know where 611 Phillips Road is, for example. So I asked one of the docents if there was a map. No, he told me, but there are directions to each house at the end of its description. Really, I say, so I first go to the list of houses to see which house is next and then I flip through the book (there is no table of contents and no page numbers) until I find that house, and then I flip through some more pages to find the end of its description and the directions are supposed to be there? Yes, he affirmed what he had said. I tried it, and of course he was incorrect. What you had to do was go find the section for a particular house and then skim backwards through the description of the previous house to find where the driving directions begin. But that's only an irritation.

Here's my gripe: the directions are not laid out in the tried and true list fashion. Oh, no. They are simply run along the same way as all the text in the book. Mixed in with the driving directions are highlights to admire as you drive along: the Frank Sinatra house, the Welwood Murray Cemetery, for example. All very lovely and painless if you've got a navigator to read it aloud. But, I pointed out to the docent, rather challenging for someone driving alone. "Oh, you are driving alone?" he asked, with a hint of a tone to suggest that the idea of the lonely appreciation of architecture was mildly repugnant.

During my first navigational foray from the Wexler House to the Stewart/Dyer House I observed ahead and behind me a string of cars being driven by single men who were doing the same as I: glancing at the road and glancing at the booklet trying to keep my place, ignore the unnecessary directions to observe sights along the way, and trying to avoid crushing the tourists underneath. Later I saw the same docent at the Russell House and he asked me if the directions were working out. I told him that I had gotten it down, but now I was more concerned about being rear-ended by other tour participants who were doing the same thing as me. He assured me I had nothing to worry about because they would have to be wearing the blue bracelet, referring to the identifying rubber band we got at the beginning. Unassailable logic indeed.

Hey, for $125, I expect at least as much as I give away free on any of my hikes: a map and a bulleted list of directions.

You had to wear booties inside at every house except for the last house, the Hurd House. These delicate things will fit over a size 12 shoe, but only if you are very gentle. You are also permitted to go about in socks, or to take your shoes off and wear the booties on your bare feet. My suggestion for future tour attendees would be to wear flip flops and then easily switch to booties at each house.

The other attendees were all cooperative, respectful people. I never saw anyone break a rule. No one opened a closed door. No one sat on the furniture. We were allowed to go anywhere on the grounds and into any open room at every house. I saw very few closed rooms. People were very aware of all the other people trying to take photos and tried to avoid blocking shots, but as you will see in my photos I was shooting a TOUR of modern homes. I wasn't doing a sterile shoot for Architectural Digest. Lots of people in all my shots. Good for sense of scale.

There were, however, a handful of people who had a steady stream of juvenile criticism of anything and everything to share with their friends. I'd say they were just coke-head interior decorators from Los Angeles, but that would be an unnecessary insult to interior decorators and Los Angeles, and I actually have no idea what their drug of choice might have been.

Hey, let's talk a little about architecture. First, as I said, the Wexler House, 1272 East Verbena Drive, Palm Springs. Google satellite view of the location. Here are some of my photos:

The complete set of tour photos will be here (when I get them all uploaded), and just the photos of the Wexler House are here.

Here I'll give you some of the description of the Wexler House from the booklet we got. Much of the writing in that booklet was in a strange and sometimes confusing voice. I have tried to remove that from this description, as possible:

The Wexler House is Donald Wexler's first designed home in Palm Springs, drafted and crafted with the speed of a sand devil to beat the delivery date of that first child. Four months, a reputed $15,000 and three people were all it took in 1955 to build the 1,200 square foot house with its two bedrooms and two baths. As more sons were added, so were more bedrooms, all in the original post and beam style.

The simplicity of the plan is self-evident in the original concept. An offset T, the shorter stem to the street front encompassing carport and eat-in kitchen (the original plans show a porch rather than an eating area); the design would look comfortable in next month's issue of Dwell. The later bedrooms, placed at the back of the house, maintain the earlier straightforward schema while adding a strong visual element to the pool patio, even though the addition's wall plane breaks the original perfect counterbalance of the extended west wall of the living room with what was the shower wall of the master bath.

There are two wall extensions from the living room, the south wall extended west and the west wall extended north. They are quite serious elements of the design. You see the same fragments in Frey I where Albert sought to expand the diminutive size of his first home by running the wall planes to a more distant horizon. In the original Wexler House, those extensions had the same effect, compounded, as in Frey I, by the flat broad planes of the roof line. The current owner has expanded on that idea -- and the house, as well -- by pushing the wall plane of the carport to the eastern edge of the lot. This active shift in the volumetric perspective of the house (though intended to enhance privacy) has its counterpart in the renovation program throughout where spatial relativity is transmuted so as to magnify the physical sensation of the house without enlarging the actual volume.

Working with Wexler and Lance O'Donnell, the current owner has melded the voice of early Modernism with that of new Modernism. What was clean is still clean; what was frugal is now refulgent. Key to the success of the renovation is the manifest respect for the original footprint of the house, including the added boys' rooms. That footprint hasn't been changed. Where it could be salvaged, the original T111 plywood used for wall surfaces, inside and out, is still there. Where a poor imitation had been applied previously, it was removed; and, at great expense, the beveling in the grooves in the current commercially available T111 was removed to reflect the original's profile. You can see the bevelled version in a panel inside the carport; its presence is a nice reminder why obsession is so brilliant. (The original T111 was made available to Wexler at a discount by the manufacturer -- an early example of product placement.) Most of the glass in the house is original single pane. The hardscape around the pool is original, though the pool coping was redone (out of necessity) and the pool itself was refinished in black and charcoal. The lava rock has been added and the landscaping changed with the addition of the ficus.

In renovating the house, the current owner has taken certain elements that had been fundamentally changed by previous owners, kitchen and bath rooms, updating them with the latest and greatest... see the pop-up electrical hub in the kitchen counter, for example. Other adaptations have been made to reflect the current owner's life, hence, in the back addition, two of the boys' rooms were merged to form the new master bedroom though the placement of the original windows was not changed. The third bedroom is now a study/office. The inner bedroom of the original floor plan is now the passage to the back of the house; the book shelves in the passageway were added at Wexler's suggestion and display a nice collection of art books. The floors are poured terrazzo throughout, replacing a patchwork of concrete, carpet and tile. Exterior wall and eave lighting is original, as are the can lights on the south side ceiling of the living room.

Microsoft vs. Apple ... Campuses

A visitor recounts his experiences in visiting the campuses of both Microsoft and Apple within the same week. One campus was intuitively easy to navigate. The other required repeated starts, stops, backing up and starting again.

Open House at Marmol Radziner Prefab Today

Today from 1 to 4 PM, you can tour the Marmol Radziner house in Desert Hot Springs.

John Lautner - "Lethal Weapon 2"

I'm not too sorry to say I've never seen Lethal Weapon 2, but if you have, you might be interested to know that the house Mel Gibson pulls down a hillside is a still-standing John Lautner-designed house at 7436 Mulholland Drive known as the "Garcia House."

"After" Begins

Recently I made reference to Andy and Tim's kitchen after being treated by Sell This House. That was the "Before." I dropped by yesterday to admire the effect and, in that kitchen, saw the very beginnings of "After." I see real paper towels, pasta sauce and (probably) a bag of pasta waiting to be boiled. What next, I ask, a cereal bowl?!

Their official website. You, too, can own a gay landmark.

Holy Moly!

Nobody told me about this! "This" is the new building for Fenway Community Health which was my health care provider in Boston (and one of the recipients of Pallota's Boston-New York AIDS Rides). This giant new building is going up at 1330 Boylston in Boston, Massachusetts, which was, I believe, a strip of parking lots, bars and small storefronts between the Burger King and McDonald's. I would think this must be the biggest building on the block, but the live camera is on something called the "Trilogy building" which doesn't ring a bell for me, so maybe other bigger things have been built since I left.

More info about the building here.

I came across this while browsing Fenway's website after getting an email announcing that Senator Ted Kennedy will receive this year's Congressman Gerry E. Studds Visibility Award at the Men's Event. Unfortunately, they don't have that info up on their website yet.

Google street view shows us how it looks from the points of view of Burger King and McDonald's, respectively:

Neutra VDL House Open Saturdays For Tours

Photo by ken mccown. More of his photos of the Neutra VDL house can be seen here.

A brief history of the house here. "the house will be opened to the public without appointment on Saturdays, beginning this weekend from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission is $10. 2300 Silver Lake Blvd." The official website for the house is here.

Diane Keaton Flips

Houses, of course. She's currently selling the Lloyd Wright designed Alfred Newman Estate at 14148 West Sunset Boulevard. More images of the house here.

The Architecture Of John Lautner

The Desert Hot Springs Motel, designed by John Lautner.

The Hammer Museum will be hosting Between Heaven and Earth: The Architecture of John Lautner from July 13 to October 12, 2008.

Over the course of a career spent largely in Los Angeles, John Lautner (1911–1994) captured the essence of Southern California in more than 150 distinctive structures. Trained by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lautner is best known for such private homes as the Elrod Residence in Palm Springs, featured in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, and Los Angeles's iconic "Chemosphere."

More about the exhibit here.

BTW, Lautner's Wolff House is for sale.

La Miniatura

Photo by scott waterman. Yesterday, the Gamble House in Pasadena organized a rare tour of La Miniatura, the 1923 house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

More of scott waterman's photos of La Miniatura can be found here.

UPDATE: The L.A. Times story on La Miniatura.

Kaufmann House To Be Auctioned

"Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House will be auctioned on May 13 during Christie's New York Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening sale." The current owners Beth and Brent Harris, bought the Kaufmann House for $1.9 million in 1993 and have spent $5 million on its restoration. They retained "Marmol & Radziner" [sic] to handle the restoration. The Desert Sun says the house may be worth between $15 million and $25 million.

Here's an article about the restoration process.

Here's the N.Y. Times article about the auction, which is dated October 31, 2007! I guess they've got a backlog at the Desert Sun. The Times also mentions that the sale is part of the divorce of the owners, and it says the purchase price was "about $1.5 million."

Wikipedia article about the architect Richard Neutra. He worked briefly for Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed Kaufmann's other house: Fallingwater.

Marmol Radzinor Prefab On The Market

The Marmol Radziner Prefab house in Desert Hot Springs is now for sale. Asking price is only $1.85 million. "The Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine called the house 'Prefabulous,' and GQ called it a 'masterpiece in a box' and 'far and away the most stylish and sexy of its kind.'"

Via, and via.

K.C. Southern Destroys Bucky Dome

The "Bucky Dome" in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, designed by Buckminster Fuller, was built in 1958 for the Union Tank Car Company. At that time it was the largest dome in the world and was the first industrial use of a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. It came into the ownership of K.C. Southern Railway in 1990, and has been vacant since. In 2008 it would have become 50 years old and would have been eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, but with not even the courtesy of a notice to interested parties, K.C. Southern destroyed the dome in November.

"It was a shock to everyone," says Elizabeth Thompson, executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute in New York. "It’s just a real loss to the architectural community."

Amboy Motel

Photo by Echo_29.

World's Biggest Building

An article reporting that the world's biggest building will be constructed in Moscow. The building will be called Crystal Island. Its floor area will four times that of the Pentagon. This image in the linked article is labeled in Russian, but it clearly indicates that the building will be infested with large parasitic worms and will be orbited by its own Death Star which will fruitlessly try to burn out the parasites with laser beams. A little more info here.

The thing is going to cost $4 billion, which is like potato chip crumbs compared to Boston's Big Dig. Why, the Big Dig's lawsuits alone are going to cost more than $4 billion!

BTW, for those who wonder, I was at a Boxing Day Dessert Party tonight hosted by former Bostonians Dave & Steve. The party was well-populated with former Bostonians and even included some that actually still live there! No one (not a single one) said anything about the Big Dig reaching its "conclusion" (also known as Big Dig, Phase One).

Chrysler Spire

Photo by Nachosan.

Boston's Skylines

Here architectural Boston documents the growth of Boston's skyline from the 1960s to 2005. They include a lot of photos taken by yours truly. I knew my shots would be historical some day!

Kansas City To Replace Paseo Bridge

Photo of existing Paseo Bridge (built in the year of my birth) by bridgink. The K.C. Star says the Paseo Bridge is "regarded by many as the most stately of Kansas City’s bridges," which may be why Kansas City is known as the City Of Fountains rather than the City Of Bridges.

But now the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission has announced the design for the replacement bridge. "As much as the Golden Gate Bridge sets San Francisco apart or New York is linked with the Brooklyn Bridge, there is hope that a new Paseo Bridge will do the same for Kansas City."

Kansas City's inferiority complex should be nearly as well known as its barbecue. They are constantly wanting something new that will be as good as something in New York, San Francisco, Paris, or even St. Louis. The exceptions to the inferiority complex are barbecue (they never say it's as good as Abilene's), jazz (not "as good as heard in Paris!") and probably football (second only to the Packers).

Go to the linked article, especially you Bostonians, and you will see that proposed bridge is not on the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate, but is like one-half of Boston's Zakim Bridge. It just lacks the phallic topper on the tower that on the Zakim Bridge echos the Bunker Hill Monument.

The Zakim Bridge.

Under A Half Mil

For only $495,000 you could own a piece of John Lautner history in Desert Hot Springs. The price for the motel has been cut again. A discussion on the subject of the motel and its sale is going on here.

Encounter Restaurant Re-opens

The famous Encounter restaurant in the iconic Theme Building at LAX re-opened for business yesterday. The structure, completed in 1961, is still undergoing major renovation to repair water damage (from back when it used to rain, you know).

As it was:

Photo by krobbie

The Other Spa City

Excelsior Springs is not too far northwest of Kansas City, Missouri, where I grew up. I visited there only once in the mid-1960s when my grandfather was there taking the waters for his arthritis. He was probably staying at The Elms. Where, the Chamber of Commerce tells us, Al Capone used to hang out! How's that for a connection?! And it's where Truman spent the "night of his victory over Thomas Dewey." That is, the night before the famous photo.

My mother, just to get rid of us kids, told my brothers and me to "go find the Hall of Waters." Her only clarifying directions were that it's a small town and the building "looked like a municipal building." That made sense to us, coming from Kansas City, where all the municipal buildings were some version of Art Deco.

The Hall of Waters; photo by pnoeric. More of his photos of the Hall of Waters here.

Interior photo by FotoEdge. More of his photos of the Hall of Waters here.

Here TravelLady tells us that the special claim to fame in Excelsior Springs is that it "has more types of naturally occurring mineral water than anywhere else in the world". In Desert Hot Springs we have just two: hot and cold, but both are simply the best. It's quality versus quantity. The Hall of Waters was built directly over the only iron-manganese spring in the United States.

A Wikipedia article about the history of Excelsior Springs.

The present city hall, The Hall of Waters, was constructed between 1936 and 1938 by architects Keene & Simpson above the Siloam and Sulpho-Saline Springs.

Present at the dedication was movie star Brenda Joyce who played Jane in several Tarzan movies, including Tarzan's Magic Fountain. "Oh, Tarzan! That was magic! Make your fountain spray again!"

Damage was caused by flooding in 1955. Bottling operations were shut down in 1967.

Weird U.S. paid a visit "recently" and got shown some of the closed-down parts of the hall. Including, probably, this abandoned pool:

You can see in this set of photos by Hypno+Raygun that some of the interior is in excellent condition.

One of the exterior lights photographed by iluvlilsugar.

The Hall of Waters in the 1940s.

Here's a 1957 photo of folks relaxing outside the Hall of Waters from this set of photos by leefk.

And finally, the first movie to feature Michael Douglas in a starring role was Adam at Six A.M. filmed on location in Excelsior Springs.

Truro's "Beige Motel"

Thanks to ROJ, ever-alert reader, for bringing this story to our attention. In Truro, Massachusetts, there was the Pilgrim Springs Motel. It is described as being at the intersection of Routes 6 and 6A, but it's not. It's at least a quarter mile (more, I'm sure) up the hill from the intersection. If you're riding your bike to Provincetown along Route 6, the motel is at the top of the hill (on your left) just as you begin the exciting descent to the left turn you'll make onto 6A.

Google satellite image.

The motel was built in 1955, but was closed last year. The area is to be converted into Truro Tradesmen's Park, "commercial offices for tradesmen and artists."

Late last year the Truro Fire Department got some practice burning down part of the motel.

In June of 2007, the A-frame office, the only remaining structure on the site, re-opened as the "Beige Motel," an art installation by Jay Critchley.

Photo by westvillagebob.

In 2006, before it was beige.

It's surprising (frustrating, disappointing, etc.) at the nearly complete lack of photos of the Beige Motel. Mr. westvillagebob of New York City was perceptive enough to get the before and after photos above, but even when he caught it in beige he didn't know what was going on, so apparently there is nothing on site to identify the artist.

I also found three photos by Kristen Lou on Flickr: here, here and here.

Here's an article from a Brewster newspaper. The interior has been transformed by other artists.

And an article from Artstrand in Provincetown.

An interview (with an interior photo) by the WGBH affiliate on Cape Cod.

Here's a press release on the proposed future of the motel:

>>> "Jay Critchley" <reroot@comcast.net> 10/1/2007 11:55 PM >>>
Contact: Jay Critchley
508 487-3684

FOR IMMEDIATE RLEASE

BEIGE MOTEL UP FOR AUCTION ON eBAY.COM.

The world's largets sand-encrusted motel on Rte 6, Cape Cod, North Truro, MA USA, the Beige Motel, created by Jay Critchley, will officially close its doors on Sunday, October 14 at 4pm. It will then be put on the auction block through eBay.com

With the 1955 structure set for demolition in 2008, the highest bidder will have the opportunity to relocate the iconic roadside attraction to a new permanent home where, hopefully, it will continue its sixth decade of welcoming visitors and guests from around the world. The motel is owned by Truro Tradesman's Park where spaces for businesses and artist studios are being built.

"In the 1960's, London Bridge was purchased for $2,400.000, dismantled and moved to Arizona where it was rebuilt in Lake Havasu City," stated artist Jay Critchley. "The Beige Motel hopes to repeat history, especially with renewed interest in the endangered architecture of the 1950's," he added.

Hours open to the public this weekend are Friday and Saturday noon to 2:00 pm. The last weekend's extended hours are Friday, Saturday and Sunday, October 12, 13, 14 noon to 4:00 pm. Also, for the final week the artist will change the nighttime lighting of the motel each night, alternating between blue, green, amber and red. For more information call 508 487-3684 or email reroot@comcast.net.

I hope some people get more photos of the place; night, interior, exterior from different angles.

Elvis Presley House

I visited the Elvis Presley house at 845 West Chino Canyon Road in Palm Springs yesterday, as they were having an open house in recognition of the 30th anniversary of Elvis' death. The current owner, Reno Fontana, who led me on the tour throughout much of the house, started out by asking when & how I became an Elvis fan. I had prepped myself for this, because I am certainly NOT an Elvis fan, but I knew such an answer would not be acceptable. On my Sirius radio, the Elvis channel is one I have blocked, along with hiphop channels, Roman Catholic channels, and Spanish language news channels. I gave him a smilingly vague answer that wasn't a lie, but was found to be acceptable. My secret mission was to discover if the words "Elvis Presley" would generate more traffic to my site than the word "nude." Of course, I've screwed that up now by inserting the N word.

The history of the house is that it was designed by Albert Frey and built about 1950 for the Jergens family (THE Jergens). After them, it was owned by the McDonalds (the burger family, not the farmers). And then in 1970, Presley. After Elvis' death, Priscilla owned the house, but couldn't afford to keep it. She sold it to Frankie Valli. Valli eventually sold it to a wealthy Japanese Elvis fan for $2.5 million. In the years that the Japanese fan owned it, he resided in it for only about 3 months, because he discovered he had a fear of flying. He put it on the market in 2003 using a Los Angeles real estate agency who obviously didn't know what they were doing. The house was marketed for three months in Los Angeles without a nibble. They then turned to an agent in Palm Springs who sold it almost immediately to Fontana and a partner for only $1.25 million. But the house had been virtually without maintenance the entire time that the Japanese fan owned it. Last year, Fontana bought out his partner and began on a course to develop the house into a major attraction.

He plans to rehab and restore the property, keeping as much of Elvis in it as possible, but he does not intend to return it to a museum quality duplicate of the house Elvis had in 1977. Instead, he says, he plans to decorate in a way he thinks Elvis might have, if he had lived out a full life. Priscilla will be involved in the restoration and development.

He also plans to add facilities on an undeveloped bit of desert behind the house that is part of the property. Part of that development is underground parking big enough for tour buses and a large number of cars. Chino Canyon Road which is not much more than a one-lane road, will be widened as part of the construction of one of those infamous gated communities on the previously untouched Chino cone across the street. Fontana also said he visualized carving a bust of Elvis in a foothill of Mt. San Jacinto that looms up behind the property, a la Mt. Rushmore. He may have been joking, as he gestured at the hillside where I know the northern end of the North Lykken trail goes. But before I could share my pessimism on that project he said an alternative would be a laser projection of Elvis on the hillside every night. That's the sort of thing I could smile and nod, saying "Yes, you might be able to pull that off," while thinking to myself "Not if WE have anything to say about it!" Might be time for the Sierra Club to set up one of its robotic big horn sheep on that hillside.

The website for the house is here. It launches with flash, and plays continuous Elvis music, and a lot of the pages are incomplete.

But the big excitement for all you gay men (and others, too, probably) is that both Bravo and TLC are negotiating for the rights to film the repair and rehab work. Fontana says it will go to the higher bidder. The work and filming will be done this autumn, and the resulting programs will be shown in Spring 2008 during a sweeps week. That could be pretty fun, especially if his contractors' behavior is consistent with the infamous reputation of so many contractors in Coachella Valley. There could be hundreds of hours of video of sitting and waiting for someone to show. And when the city inspectors come by, don't you think that Mayor Oden will find an excuse to tag along? He's been getting himself in front of a lot of cameras recently.

Fontana says he contacted the 32 neighbors who live within 1,000 feet of the house. Twenty-nine of them signed a statement supporting his plans, and the other three will not be a problem, he said. Those 29 have been promised one free night of use of the house every two years. I'm sure that means each household gets it for one night, not that all 29 households have to coordinate some sort of hellish indoor block party. Fontana tells me that the city views his project very favorably and he expects it to sail along.

My set of photos of the Elvis Presley house are here and below are a few samples. I know many of you will be asking where the bathroom photos are. That was the one spot where we were told we couldn't photograph. Elvis had two bathrooms opening off of his bedroom. His own bath was done in red and black tile with a sunken bathtub, pretty much standard size, except for being sunken. A standard toilet. The other guest bathroom had a small shower with a narrow door that Army Elvis could have used, but not 1970s Elvis. It was done in red and black tile.

I had expected tremendous congestion for the tour, but I was able to drive right up to the house. Most of the cars parked out front belonged to the owner's family or other people helping out. I remarked that I was surprised at the lack of a crowd, but Fontana told me it had been a very busy morning and I had been fortunate to arrive during a lull (about 1:30 PM). Shortly after we started our tour, a family visiting from New Jersey joined us. I asked why New Jerseyites would visit Palm Springs in August. They said they had come in August a couple of years ago for a wedding and loved it, so they returned. Their only complaint was that there was not much to do, so they were very happy to read about the Elvis Presley open house in the newspaper. After our tour ended (which may have lasted as much as an hour), I saw two or three other people had arrived and were waiting to start a tour.

The "Lenses" Lit Up

The Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins art museum in Kansas City. Photo by Cate 2007. See her entire set of photos from the opening night gala here.

While here you will find a great photo by David S. Allee in a New Yorker article about the building.

And do not overlook the link to the NY Times article provided in a comment last week by reader "b."

Bloch Building

This is the standard view of the Nelson-Atkins art museum in Kansas City.

Photo by timsamoff.

Today I learned that without consulting me, they have built a large expansion on the east (right hand) side, calling it The Bloch Building. It's named for Henry and Ruth Bloch, founders of H&R Block. It will open to the public on June 9.

This page has a good photo that makes it look like the new addition blends well. But if you take a look at these photos by ChrisM70 you may get a different impression.

The buildings are said to be covered in glass, but look like tin sheds by day.

Real Estate Price Cut

I don't know if the cut is as big as those "spectacular" cuts promised at most of the new developments around town, but now the asking price for the John Lautner (AKA, Desert Hot Springs) Motel has been cut from $745,000 to $650,000. Grab your checkbook.

Thanks to Echo_29.