Your Indoor/Outdoor Lifestyle Owes a Lot to Paul R. Williams

Picture Los Angeles the way the movies showed you: French doors pulled wide to blooming bougainvillea, a living room that steps straight onto a terrace, which then steps down to a pool. It’s a vision of the city the world fell for, and much of it is owed to the work of the late Paul R. Williams.

If his name doesn’t ring a bell, his work will. The architect designed estates for Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant, Mrs. Robinson’s Palm Drive home from The Graduate, and, in Palm Springs, a desert modernist hideaway for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. In the 1940s, he led the renovation of the Beverly Hills Hotel, adding the Crescent Wing and its poolside cabanas, and is widely credited for its timeless pink-and-green palette that earned it the nickname the "Pink Palace." The famous looping script on its façade is his handwriting.

But central to William’s legacy was how a Southern California home should connect with the outdoors. A LACMA exhibition on the architect opening November 15 starts with one example, his own Lafayette Square address. As the lore goes, after Williams’s wife, Della Mae, fell for a lanai on a trip to Jamaica in the late 1940s, he designed a residence with one at its heart. The 1952 home’s second-story terrace cantilevers over a curved room that opens onto a patio and gardens. "It’s not only indoor/outdoor, where you can move easily out to the gardens," says Staci Steinberger, the museum’s curator of decorative arts and design. "The plantings come inside as well."

The LACMA exhibition, which surveys the breadth of Williams’s practice and dives deep into his residential work, is one of three new shows that represent the first major presentation of his archive. One at the Getty focuses on the buildings he designed for and with Black communities, and another at USC Fisher turns a lens on Williams’s contributions to modern multifamily housing, shown alongside new works by contemporary artists and designers responding to his archive.

Williams was the first Black architect licensed west of the Mississippi and the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects. Between the 1920s and ’70s, he designed hotels, churches, banks, and civic landmarks, along with nearly 2,000 homes in Los Angeles alone. Williams got his start by garnering publicity through architecture competitions, catching the eye of former U.S. senator Frank Putnam Flint, who hired him to design homes for an affluent, segregated neighborhood near Pasadena, what is now La Cañada Flintridge.

Yet the world he conjured was barred to him. Racial covenants kept him out of many of the neighborhoods he would go on to design, and according to the AIA, he learned to render his drawings upside down so white clients could view them from across the table rather than sit beside him. In his 1937 essay "I Am a Negro," he wrote bluntly about creating homes in the country’s most desirable neighborhoods while living somewhere else.

As Williams was launching his practice in the 1920s, Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra were redrawing architectural boundaries. Williams gracefully folded their modernist ideals into the Georgian manors and Spanish colonial villas his clients coveted. "He’s taking those ideas and synthesizing them in his own way," says Sarah Locke, an architectural historian at LACMA. "Light is such an important thing that he focuses on," she adds. "Using big bay windows, French doors, any opportunity he has to connect with it." Eventually, Williams began to bend entire homes around the outdoors: The Georgian-style Jay Paley House in Holmby Hills, completed in 1936, features an H-shaped plan framing a grand forecourt, with two sandy "beaches" flanking a backyard pool; at the Peppergate Ranch in West Hills, built in 1939, a single-story "U" unfurls atop a knoll, with rooms spilling out under exposed beams.

Williams also fought for the indoor/outdoor lifestyle beyond ritzy neighborhoods. He sat on the city’s first housing commission from 1933 to 1941, a post from which he designed public housing including Pueblo del Rio and Nickerson Gardens. The low-rise developments, still standing today, feature generous outdoor spaces with shared lawns and garden-apartment configurations.

The LACMA exhibition, "Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living," borrows its title from a 1946 Ebony profile on Williams called "Designer for Living." Says Steinberger, "When he’s designing a residence, he’s not thinking about this from some ideological perspective of what architecture is supposed to be. He’s really thinking about the life of his client." As the postwar boom took off, Williams published two pattern books, The Small Home of Tomorrow in 1945, and a year later, New Homes for Today. After, Williams would design Carver Manor, a subdivision of 250 homes that helped Black families put down roots as first-time homeowners, with several of the homes bearing resemblance to the plans in his books.

In a 1949 essay in Ebony, Williams predicted the formal living room would give way to informal rooms opening onto the garden. The idea was rooted in one of his first personal design experiments: At his 1905 bungalow in Exposition Park, in the 1930s, he added a detached building he called a "Playroom." But "it’s not a playroom for kids," Steinberger says, laughing. Under a pyramidal roof, the room had an open bar, a grill, and a fireplace. Its large louvered doors opened onto the yard, so a party could drift outside and back in again.

Williams died in January of 1980 at the age of 85. But over the years, his houses, built around patios and sliding glass doors and yes, often complemented with bougainvillea, have appeared in Sunset and Architectural Digest countless times, carrying ideas of indoor/outdoor living well beyond Los Angeles. When the Getty acquired his archive in 2020, then-director Mary Miller said it "essentially tells the story of how the modern Southland was built."

Decades later, it’s still how Los Angeles lives—and how the rest of us want to.

"Paul R. Williams: An Architect Considered" is on view at the USC Fisher Museum of Art through March 13, 2027. "Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living" runs at LACMA from Nov. 15, 2026, to May 31, 2027. The Getty Research Institute’s "Architecture Across the Color Line" opens Dec.15.

Top photo © Della M. Williams Trust Dated December 15, 1988

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