Sunmor Estates Home Tour
Saturday April 17, 2010 10 AM to 1PM
The Sunmor neighborhood consists of a collection of modernist atomic ranch style homes constructed in the late 50′s & 60′s, by the Alexander Construction Company and local builder, Robert Higgins.
For more Sumor information, click here.
Not far from Palm Springs, can be found the latest design by prefab pioneer, Jennifer Siegal of the Office of Mobile Design whohas ventured inland to install its latest design, the Prefab Showhouse. Formerly located in Venice, CA where it served as OMD’s showroom for inquisitive clients, the diminutive modular maison was just recently moved from its coastal location to be installed in the desert community of Joshua Tree where it will be the new home to Hollywood film producer Chris Hanley.
The 720 sf, 1 bedroom home is located on a generous Joshua Tree-sized lot of 80 acres. Besides solitude, tranquility, and expansive views of the surrounding desert, the home offers the very best in new technologies and luxurious details. The central kitchen/bath core divides and separates the sleeping space from the public eating/living space in a compact assemblage of form and function. The steel frame structure was trucked into the site and simply set on a temporary foundation.
With this desert pied-a-terre, OMD proves that ideas of prefabrication, flexibility, portability and compact spaciousness can be combined to make off-the-grid living perfectly comfortable
Just got my tickets today!! I’ve been wanting to see this house since I was a kid, visiting Palm Springs. Here’s a great opportunity to check it out, and to join the Palm Springs Museum and the Arts and Design Council.
The Arts and Design Council is holding its anual ADC Fundraiser – (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM – Saturday, March 20)
This is a rare opportunity to enjoy the spectacular Hope House at a cocktail reception with fellow ADC members. The enormous roof, which echoes the surrounding hills of Southridge, hovers over an expansive patio and garden area where Lautner’s dramatic architecture can be experienced. Invitations will be mailed to ADC members.
Fundraiser
ADC Fundraiser at the Bob & Dolores Hope House, designed by John Lautner
$200 per person (ADC members only)
To make reservations, please call Brooke Devenney at 760.322.4818 or email bdevenney@psmuseum.org
SEE YOU THERE!
Palm Springs : Better, Bolder, Beautiful from Palm Springs Tourism on Vimeo.
Cool video on improvements going on in Palm Springs!
Literally one of THE most architecturally significant homes in all the world. Known as The Elrod House, this John Lautner-designed home was commissioned by designer Arthur Elrod in 1968 and has been featured in numerous books, magazines and museum exhibitions. It is the iconic home perched at the very tip of the Southridge enclave, easily viewable throughout Palm Springs. Organic shapes, monumental construction and world class design create an extraordinary experience of space that Lautner himself described as ”timeless” architecture. The 60 ‘ wide circular living room has a conical dome that fans out in nine petals between nine clerestories angled up to bring in light. Retractable curved glass walls open the entire living room and pool terrace to panoramic views of Mt San Jacinto, Mt San Gorgonio and the full sweep of the valley below and mountain ranges beyond. The very rock of the ridge is incorporated into the design thru out the home
Great video from the James Bond classic featuring Thumber and Bambi, highlighting the John Lautner Elrod House in Palm Springs
Yours to enjoy for $13,890,000
Just listed:
Interesting article about Palm Springs life, in 1959….Posted in TheMercuryNews.com
By Christopher Reynolds
Los Angeles Times Posted: 02/23/2010 05:23:05 PM PST Updated: 02/23/2010 05:23:07 PM PST
PALM SPRINGS — President Dwight D. Eisenhower, on holiday from the White House, whips a golf club beneath a blue October sky. Frank Sinatra, driven indoors by a December rainstorm, schmoozes with Peter Lawford and sings with Ella Fitzgerald.
Meanwhile, other rich and famous folk are partying at the Chi Chi Club or pulling up their Cadillac coupes in front of the Riviera, a new modern hotel. All over the Coachella Valley, architects and builders are seducing tourists with butterfly roof lines, space-age appliances, minimalist graphics and backlighted starbursts.
Yes, 1959 was a swinging year in Palm Springs. And it’s not over yet.
Thanks to preservationists, entrepreneurs, publishers and design-driven travelers, the cult of Desert Modernism gets bigger and bigger, drawing retro pilgrims to Palm Springs. Inspired by books about Palm Springs and the 1950s, I spent three October days in the desert, all dedicated to 1959.
I consulted Peter Moruzzi’s “Palm Springs Holiday,” a volume of vintage postcards, menus, brochures, matchbooks and old photos. For further kicks, I consulted “1959: The Year Everything Changed,” in which author Fred Kaplan proposes that year as an unheralded pivot point in history.
Kaplan asserts that 1959 “was the year when the shock waves of the new ripped the seams of daily life … when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled, when everything was changing and everyone knew it — when the world as we now know it began to take form.”
Racquet Club Estates is the neighborhood where Alexander Construction Co. and architect William Krisel put up their first vacation-house subdivision in 1959. Picture a ‘hood of soaring roofs, clerestory windows, carports, screens of concrete blocks, pebbles and palms in the yard, and living rooms begging for Dean Martin on the hi-fi. New, these houses sold for $19,000. Now, with classic features bathed in avocado green, bold orange and powder blue, vacation rentals run $200 to $300 a night.
“Nineteen-fifty-nine was a good year for architecture here,” said Jade Nelson, 33, the manager of Orbit In hotel. The city “has made this resurgence because of its architectural legacy,” Nelson said. “But it lost the glamour that era brought with it. All the celebrities. There were hundreds of them.”
Palm Springs, which has about 48,000 year-round residents now, had about 13,000 then. The main drag, then as now, was Palm Canyon Drive.
For a view of the future, drive to the tall, ultramodern City National Bank building, which horrified some and transfixed others when completed in 1959.
The building, designed by Rudy Baumfeld of Victor Gruen Associates, was an homage to a tall, ultramodern chapel that modernist pioneer Le Corbusier had designed in Ronchamp, France. Now it’s a Bank of America. But it’s also a reminder that builders and architects then were thinking outside the box.
So was architect Albert Frey. In addition to a number of startling private homes and a compound now known as the Movie Colony Hotel, Frey collaborated on the low-slung City Hall and Fire Station No. 1 in the mid-’50s. By 1959, he was working on the city’s aerial tram, which would be completed in 1963.
Later came Frey’s pointy-roofed Tramway gas station, near the northern entrance to town. It now houses Palm Springs Visitor Center. A $5 map offers 75 local modernist landmarks, including many designed by Frey, William F. Cody and E. Stewart Williams.
Overnight visitors in 1959 had plenty of options: El Mirador (opened in the 1920s, closed in the ’70s) with its red tile roof; the brand-new Spa Hotel, or the Riviera, which opened in 1959 with guest buildings radiating out from the central pool like spokes from the hub of a wheel.
As the 50th anniversary approached, the owners spent $70 million on a renovation that has added Hollywood Regency promiscuity to the old minimalism with red chandeliers, portraits made of Guatemalan coins, colorized posters of bathing beauties.
In the Riviera’s new incarnation, the main pool’s edges curve gently, flanked by fire pits and cabanas. The 406 guest rooms are a riot of brown and orange and white, (like the Vegas Strip, but no casino.
Not everybody wants to stay in a big hotel, and by 1959 Palm Springs was full of tiny ones. In the Tennis Club district, a short stroll from downtown, was the Town & Desert (built in 1947, designed by Herb Burns). The Village Manor (1957, Burns again) was a few doors away.
After restoration and relaunches in the early 2000s, the Town & Desert is now the Hideaway (10 rooms) and the Village Manor is the Orbit In (nine rooms). With their prime locations, period furnishings, prices beginning at less than $150 and playful retro interiors, the two are stars in the modernist tourism revival.
“That chair came from a dumpster. It had pink upholstery,” said Nelson, pausing at a reclaimed retro armchair at the Hideaway.
The refurbished Chase Hotel (26 rooms), which went up in the late 1940s, used to be the Holiday House. A few blocks over are the stacked boulders and off-kilter angles of William F. Cody’s Del Marcos Hotel (16 rooms), a brilliantly designed but somewhat bedraggled 1947 spot with some renovation.
On the bending stretch of East Palm Canyon Drive that used to be called Indio Road is another sleek Herb Burns design from 1951: the Desert Riviera (11 rooms), a stark, U-shaped outpost with a pool in the middle.
Across the street is the bohemian Ace Hotel (which opened as a Howard Johnson’s hotel in 1965, with a Denny’s next door) and the quiet Alexander Inn, which was probably apartments in 1959.
With the recession knocking down rates, these small hoteliers would rather see adult couples than kids. Families are more welcome at the bigger resorts.
The former 1959 Holiday Inn sits at the south end of town on East Palm Canyon Drive. Since 1959, multiple owners have nudged the property upscale, including Gene Autry and Merv Griffin. Since 2004, it’s been known as the Parker Palm Springs. The midcentury bones of the 13-acre, three-pool, 144-room compound are amended with designer Jonathan Adler’s eclectic whimsy — knights in armor, butterfly chairs. Mister Parker’s is the hotel’s upscale eatery. The extremely low light (a flashlight comes with menu) and the groovy 1960s and ’70s art, are reflected by mirrored ceilings.
The reborn Parker’s, Moruzzi writes, is proof “that Palm Springs truly is the face-lift capital of the desert.”
Of course, plenty of ’50s Palm Springs landmarks have been lost, including the Desert Air (a fly-in hotel) and the Chi Chi Club (closed in the ’60s).
And up and down the valley, scores of new hotels and restaurants and golf courses and condos and water parks and such have arisen. But in a territory that’s so mutable, it’s a great comfort to lie in the shade of the rediscovered buildings that endure.
1959 Time-line
The Cove at Palm Springs was a new developement that cropped up in the “Windy Point” section of Palm Springs back during the California real estate gold rush days of 2006/2007. The project featured beautiful courtyard homes surrounding an alleged golf course. They were listing in the $400,000s as I remember it- They were advertised as “Mid-Century” Homes (which I never understand, since they were built in 2006!)
A little bit about the location- The Cove was located in Windy Point…you know where you see all those windmills when you drive in off the 111 from Hwy 10 to Palm Springs? You probably noticed a little community tucked up against the foothills on the west side of the road a few miles before you get to Palm Springs.
There’s a reason why there are windmills there- the wind is extreme to say the least!! Makes the north Palm Springs neighborhood wind look mild by comparison. The general public, regardless of the rush to buy real estate, must have thought so as well- because despite gorgeous models, they didn’t sell well. The complex has been vacant for years now, the golf course (which was later supposed to be just a green belt) is dead. The community buildings and club house, never built. All the beautiful landscaping that was planted has since died!!
In any event, this home located in the Cove, was just listed for $89,000! (Its an REO)
“Courtyard contemporary at The Cove. These were selling for the low $400s before the builder went under. Granite island kitchen, Great Room concept. Good opportunity to hold for the future. Many uinfinshed properties and vacant parcels. There is no HOA. Developemtn was not connected to sewer so properties use a temporary holding tank and the county will require the new buyer to install a septic system. Buyers need to confirm all this during inspections.”
For that price, maybe its worth tolerating the wind and having to install your own sewer! But hopefully this is a lesson learned about the old real estate mantra, “location location location.”
Summarized from the Washington post….
Numerous articles have reported that homeowners are underwater and that strategic defaults are increasing. However, a little known statistic by the Federal Reserve shows that home equity again is on the rise.
MAKING SENSE:
The Federal Reserve conducts substantial research on mortgage balances and home-value changes in hundreds of local markets nationwide and reports its finding quarterly. According to the Fed’s most recent “flow of funds” survey, homeowners’ net equity increased by nearly $1 trillion compared with the recession’s lowest point between the first and third quarters of 2009. From June 30 to Sept. 30, net equity rose by $418 billion.
According to a report by Zillow.com, the overall negative equity rate among U.S. homeowners remained flat in the fourth quarter at 21.4 percent. This report, combined with other housing factors and studies, may indicate that the unprecedented reduction in home equity is shifting.
Some homeowners, especially those in areas with high foreclosure rates, are choosing to strategically default on their mortgages, even though they can afford the mortgage. Many homeowners who choose this approach do so because they do not see an economic rationale in continuing to make their mortgage payments. Homeowners considering this option should be aware of the negative effect it will have on their credit status. Foreclosures can remain on credit reports for up to seven years, likely increasing the interest rates the consumer pays for credit, and making it more difficult to receive approval on a new mortgage loan.
Enjoy a martini with your fellow hipsters…as you watch the sun set…from the Arthur Elrod House, one of the world’s most acclaimed examples of modernist architecture.
Designed by architect John Lautner in 1968, the Elrod House entered the popular culture in 1971 as the setting for a famous scene in the James Bond “007” movie Diamonds are Forever.
Purchase your tickets early – the Retro Martini Party is the “hot” ticket of Modernism Week and tickets are limited. Remember, last year’s Retro Martini Party sold out early and this year’s incomparable venue will surely do the same.
For tickets, visit www.PalmSpringsPreservationFoundation.org
SEE YOU THERE!
Agent Contact Information: |
Paul Kaplan |
