Palm Springs, California

Tags:: Culture

In Palm Springs, California, “mid-century modern” connotes more than just Eames chairs and glass walls; it also hints at Hollywood Regency. From the 1920s through the 1970s, silver screen stars from Frank Sinatra to Bob Hope built vacation homes in the Coachella Valley by modern architects such as E. Stewart Williams and John Lautner. But in Palm Springs, modernism became more that just a style for celebrities, it became a way of life for the masses, too. The Alexander Construction Company built over 2,500 affordable tract homes designed by the likes of Charles DuBois, Donald Wexler, and, predominantly, William Krisel.

— Miyoko Ohtake

In the 1940s, Edgar J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store giant and the same Kaufmann who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build his Falling Water home in Pennsylvania, asked architect Richard Neutra to built a vacation home for his family in Palm Springs. The resulting home is now one of Neutra’s best-known works.

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