Our Famous House

I am fascinated by architecture.  

It exists in a space partway between art and craft, beauty and usefulness. It is sculpture that you walk around in. It lives and breathes, as you live and breathe.

Sometimes, when created with special skill and imagination, it recedes into the background and becomes almost invisible, as with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple, shown here. You don’t see it, any more than you see your mouth or eyes. You’re inside it, and it’s inside you.

I grew up in such a house. It shaped me and my family, though we never would have said it that way. We cooked and ate breakfast in the funny, long kitchen, where the counters were decorated with little boomerang shapes. We had picnics on the breezeway that connected the family room and garage. We rollerskated on the patio, which, because of floor-to-ceiling windows and a sliding-glass door, was like a room in the house. And all that time, we knew nothing about the house, except that it was ours.

Decades later, long after the place had been sold and re-sold and renovated multiple times, I stumbled onto an article about our neighborhood. If my family had seen it back then, we would have laughed. It was crazy. But it was true.

Our house was famous.

In 1949, a young man named William Krisel finished a degree in architecture at the University of Southern California and a few years later was ready to practice. He was especially interested in designing homes and was eager to try out some new ideas. William, shown here on the left, formed a partnership with his friend Dan Palmer, on the right, but the two had trouble finding work.  

The father of another friend, Bob Alexander, owned Alexander Construction, a company that built homes for veterans with young families who were pouring into the San Fernando Valley, in the northern part of LA. At that time, real estate companies were building mostly one-off ranch homes that William contemptuously called “dingbats.”

Bob, William, and Dan approached Bob’s father with a proposition: Instead of designing and building homes one at a time, why not do it in groups? Bob’s father agreed. As an experiment, he let them build a “tract,” and William got to try out and refine his idea.

They created 287 of the first tract homes in the United States, one of which was ours, shown here years later. Then, pleased with the results and profits, they went on to build more than 4,000 similar homes in the San Fernando Valley. It was the beginning of a remarkable career, which culminated in Krisel designing much of Palm Springs, including the Priscilla and Elvis Presley honeymoon cottage.

Today, William Krisel’s homes are showcased in tours during Palm Springs’s annual Modernism Week. I’ll make it to the festival one of these times. When I do, I’ll think of that little home where I grew up, one of William Krisel’s first and best ideas.