Palm Desert offers $50K to restore midcentury-modern home
The city of Palm Desert is offering $50,000 to a buyer who will restore a midcentury-modern residence celebrated for its singular undulating roof.
Designed by local architect Walter S. White, the 1955 home will be auctioned Feb. 24 at the conclusion of Palm Springs Modernism Week.
“We’re hoping that a modernism enthusiast will be sympathetic to the house,” said Cora Gaugush, a city employee who is overseeing the auction. “We’ve gotten hundreds of inquires.”
The 1,954-square-foot home was approved for listing on the National Register of Historic Places in early February after being deemed a landmark by the city last month.
Enlarged to three bedrooms from one in the 1960s, the property is appraised at between $320,000 and $340,000 and is owned by a city agency, which purchased it in 2008.
Fascination surrounding the residence designed for artist Miles C. Bates has centered on White’s one-of-a-kind roof that soars over walls of glass and concrete block.
Built of long wooden dowels that nest within the concave sides of alternating slats — an interlocking system that simulates a supple spine — the covering lightly drapes over wood beams, taking their curved form. Its wave-like movement mimics the slope of distant mountains.
The design, which White patented, is among the West’s earliest sculptural roofs. He never built another.
“It’s quite significant, because it anticipates a certain roof we find much later; I’m thinking of [John] Lautner,” said Volker M. Welter, a UC Santa Barbara professor who wrote a 2015 book about White.
White was a lesser-known modernist and inventor who designed more than 100 homes in the Coachella Valley, most of them in Palm Desert. He died in 2002.
Although portions of the Bates home appear worn after a lengthy vacancy, the roof, spotted with minimal dry rot after decades of desert sun, “looks reasonably well for the age of the house,” Welter said.
Given the historical designations, the Bates home will probably attract a preservation-minded buyer, and it’s doubtful it could be demolished by an owner who forgoes the $50,000. Proposed exterior alterations would also require city approval.
The city and its historical society favor removal of a clumsy two-room stucco and block addition, which partially hides an original block wall facade — as well as a 1970s free-standing, dilapidated triplex. Other changes made in earlier decades: removal of a wall-window, enclosure of a west terrace, and an added kitchen peninsula.
Roof experimentation was White’s forte, an optimal choice in the shade-thirsty desert. The White-designed 1956 Palm Springs “Alexander” house, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is “one of the earliest examples of curved steel beams used to hold upright, stacked wooden planks,” Welter wrote in his book.
“He was into the hypar roof; it fascinated him,” Welter said in reference to a steel hyperbolic paraboloid roof system (the shape of a Pringle’s potato chip) that White patented and first used in the 1958 “Willcockson” Indio home.
Architectural historians note that White’s fixation on hypar roofs might have influenced Palm Springs’ 1965 “Tramway gas station” design, now the city’s visitors center that has been given landmark status.
White was raised in San Bernardino and was mentored in Los Angeles by modernists Rudolf Schindler and Harwell Hamilton, among others. His trademarks included metered glass corners and a preference for corner lots that afforded visual impact.
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