We are here in the United States, in Palm Springs
California at Frank Sinatra's house which is referred to as Twin Palms.
When this house was first built there was nothing here, it was completely open desert.
One thing you have to understand about houses in Palm Springs
these were exclusively built as second homes. How to provide pleasure and how to provide fun,
that really was the program requirement for most of these houses and it was very inspirational
to the architect E. Stewart Williams to just being able to express the pleasure of place,
to relish this, enjoy it, get as much pleasure as you can possibly squeeze out of it.
As the architect, this was the first house E. Stewart Williams ever designed.
For a first house, this is remarkably complex and simple.
E. Stewart Williams liked his houses to be comfortable,
that was a very primary request of his and he wanted them to be soft,
even if you look at the columns in this room you can see they're not straight up and down they're
rounded to just soften the environment and not make it so hard and geometric.
The floor plan is absolutely original, this was the exact floor plan that E. Stewart
Williams designed, what's changed is that they switched the entrance to the opposite
side of the street and truth be told this is a much more dramatic entrance.
What you see in this house is very typical in Palm Springs, this house is referred to as
having good separation, meaning the main bedroom is on one side of the house, the guest rooms are
on the other so it allows for a sense of privacy for the host and the guests and the whole house
is a meditation on the diagonal and you see that motif repeated again and again and again.
On the east side is the master bedroom which is beautifully proportioned,
he tends to makes the rooms more square than elongated rectangles, a square room gives you
more of a feeling of relaxation than a long narrow room where you feel the tension of the space.
Architecture in Palm Springs is the fusion of indoors and outdoors. The weather is so good
for such a large part of the year you want to be outdoors. The pool area is really the living room
of the house, that is really where you want to be. This represents something that I call the many
moods of modernism. People think of modern as being austere and chilly,
here you can see in this house it's completely warm and comfortable and resolutely modern.
I love the warmth of it, I love how the rooms envelop you, I love the use
of different materials: natural wood, natural stone etc. to give it that feeling of warmth.
Everything is done in deference to the mountains,
when you drive through Palm Springs you'll notice the colours tie into the colour of the mountains.
The unity between nature and architecture, that is the gist of
what Palm Springs is about. You can see how the flagstone continues from inside to out,
once again giving you that continuity between indoors and outdoors. This house has clerestory
windows above the sliding glass doors to allow more light in and Palm Springs is about the light.
Rooms that have light coming in from multiple directions feel larger than if the light is
just coming in from a single direction because the light is balanced and your eye is drawn to
the light, so it's drawn around the room as opposed to just to a particular focal point.
I think bringing that warm element into modernism was what Stu really brought
to the desert, he wanted his clients to feel comfortable, that was his primary motivation,
it's that sense of privacy and isolation that Frank was seeking and Palm Springs incidentally
was his favourite place on Earth, he loved the desert, I mean he just immediately felt home here.
There's something intrinsically relaxing about a desert, it's quiet, it's peaceful, it just
engenders a sense of relaxation but underneath Palm Springs is a massive aquifer with hundreds
of millions of gallons of water, so it's a combination of desert energy which makes you want
to relax and water energy which makes you want to party and isn't that the perfect combination.