Inside a mid-century trendy home so transfixing, its proprietor purchased it twice

Architects’ personal houses typically have a much bigger goal. The VDL overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir was extra than simply shelter to Richard Neutra, as an illustration, as had been Eileen Grey’s Villa E-1027 French Riviera retreat and Albert Frey’s hillside dwelling hovering above the Coachella Valley. The home that seminal Palm Springs modernist structure grasp Donald Wexler designed in 1954 navigated a sure rigidity, as each an aspirational design laboratory and a purposeful household house, which later fell into disrepair. It will take a devoted proprietor half a century later to completely realise the architect’s inventive intention.

Wexler’s wooden body post-and-beam construction was a prototypical automobile to discover engineering and design ideas later articulated in his experimental metal body prefabricated houses with architect Richard Harrison within the early Sixties, in addition to in his extra luxurious commissions, such because the Dinah Shore property. Initially, nonetheless, it was the place Wexler and his spouse Marilynn moved throughout her first being pregnant in 1955, after which raised their three kids.

Building took 4 months, and the modest technique of a younger architect within the early levels of his profession largely dictated the supplies. Donald and Marilynn’s focus right here was nurturing their home life and increasing the unique 1,450-square-foot envelope when wanted, whereas permitting the home’s program to have interaction in evolving design conversations of the day.

Since buying the property in 2007, Daniel Patrick Giles, a Palm Springs- and Los Angeles-based vogue and wonder business veteran, who in 2022 launched Perfumehead fragrances and was named to the Wallpaper* USA 400 in 2024, has examined and restored the potential of Wexler’s beliefs. The structure can now communicate for itself and honour its historical past.

Giles turned smitten with Palm Springs structure about 20 years in the past when a photograph shoot for his erstwhile employer, Canadian luxurious division retailer Holt Renfrew, introduced him to Neutra’s 1946 landmark Kaufmann Home. After the Toronto native started visiting the desert usually from his then-home base of San Francisco, a primary web seek for ‘Palm Springs trendy house on the market’ led him to certainly one of Donald Wexler’s metal body works; even when that individual property wasn’t on the market on the time, the architect was placed on his radar. Ultimately, a realtor confirmed him the 1955 Wexler household compound that was languishing available on the market.

‘The integrity of the home wasn’t stored up. However after I walked into it, I may visualize the construction of it, and there gave the impression to be a pleasant move,’ Gilles recollects. The meticulous restoration interventions that adopted had been based mostly on conversations with Wexler, who handed away in 2015, in addition to enter from Wexler protege Lance O’Donnell of o2 Structure. (The property is listed on the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations and is designated as a Palm Springs Class 1 Historic Useful resource.)

Giles’ particular expertise of talking with Wexler in regards to the house was considerably shocking. On this specific state of affairs, ‘I wasn’t actually coping with an architect. I used to be coping with a father, a husband, who lived there,’ Giles tells Wallpaper*. Wexler’s technical recollections had been extra strongly tied to his different initiatives, not his personal residence. However persistence proved rewarding.

After ‘unpacking the emotion, it was in regards to the purity of the home.’ Wexler revealed {that a} finances bigger than his $15,000 GI Invoice mortgage would have led to totally different selections. So, Giles changed the hodgepodge of concrete, linoleum tiles and carpeting with constant terrazzo flooring all through, as an illustration. The position of the unique can lights all stayed. The 1960 kids’s bed room remained, whereas post-Wexler interval additions had been eliminated.

Giles may have ended his relationship with the house when he bought it in 2015. And but the pull was too sturdy. When the chance introduced itself six years later, he purchased it again and thus started his subsequent chapter on the Wexler Home once more with inside designer Darren Brown on board. Regardless of all their years contemplating each inch in and out, ‘it took lots of experimenting to grasp what works and what would not work,’ Brown observes. ‘This home seems to be finest with much less stuff. It actually is in regards to the structure, and about area and lightweight.’

Brown factors to ‘shapes and types, circles and cubes, black and white, gentle and reflection’ as core guiding rules that helped decide the furnishings choice. In different phrases, simplicity. Throughout this section of what is likely to be described as under-decorating, Giles needed to additional ‘neutralise’ the home; he and Brown painstakingly developed a paint color dubbed Wexler White to coat all of the strong surfaces in a singular hue as a substitute of the beforehand contrasting posts and beams.

This can be a home of tales. In honour of its seventieth anniversary, Giles and famous curator Brooke Hodge organised Rising Up Wexler, a site-specific set up on view throughout Palm Springs Modernism Week this previous February that includes archival architectural documentation, household photographs and recollections from Glen, Gary, and Brian Wexler.

Giles’ most up-to-date love letter to the home is, appropriately, a fragrance. Along with perfumer Constance Georges-Picot, Perfumehead has launched the perfume 1272,

‘We regarded on the components round the home,’ Giles recollects, and subsequently mixed petitgrain lime, orange blossom, pink pepper, jasmine, verbena, sandalwood and different extracts to compose an olfactory homage to the home utilizing Perfumehead’s signature coltrait formulation, a cologne-extrait hybrid.

Very like how a scent evolves, the Wexler Home will proceed to be an unfolding prospect — even when the work appears to be full for now. ‘I feel 2.0 is nearly the most effective illustration of the home,’ Giles states. ‘I really feel extraordinarily fortunate to not have it as soon as, however to have it twice.’