The Kaufmann Desert House
Near Palm Springs, California
Just north of downtown, screened behind a low wall, sits a flat roofed house of glass and pale stone that helped invent the image of modern Palm Springs. This is the Kaufmann Desert House, designed by the Austrian born architect Richard Neutra and completed in nineteen forty-six. Its owner, Edgar Kaufmann, was a Pittsburgh department store magnate with famously good taste.
A few years earlier he had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fallingwater, the house cantilevered over a Pennsylvania waterfall. For his desert retreat, Kaufmann wanted something lighter, and he turned to Neutra. Neutra gave him a pinwheel of glass walled wings reaching out into the landscape, with sliding walls that erased the line between indoors and desert.
Vertical louvers and floating planes of stone let the house breathe in a climate where summer heat passes one hundred ten degrees. It was engineered comfort disguised as effortless grace. The house might have stayed a private secret if not for one photograph.
In nineteen forty-seven the photographer Julius Shulman captured it at dusk, glowing against the mountains, and the image traveled around the world. Decades later, Slim Aarons framed it again in his nineteen seventy picture Poolside Gossip. Together those photographs sold the whole idea of desert modern living.
A careful restoration in the nineteen nineties brought the house back to Neutra's exact vision, and it is now protected as a historic site.
