Projects by Name

In 1938, Hilde Margolius asked Breuer to design a house in Palm Springs, CA. The neighborhood required a "Spanish exterior," but Breuer felt that a well-designed modern house "with good relations to the garden, possibly a patio" would satisfy the stylistic requirements without resorting to historicist decoration. Breuer was correct as the development approved the design with few alterations. The main body of the single-story house was a rectangle in which all rooms surrounded a patio paved with granite and roofed with a sliding glass skylight. Beds of plantings brought nature inside the house. Two smaller, offset wings extended to the north and south of the main house. The southern wing originally incorporated a workshop and greenhouse as well as an elevated, roofed terrace. Budget limitations necessitated the elimination of the greenhouse and workshop. The northern wing included a drying yard, maid's room and garage. The house was of wood frame construction with a concrete foundation. All interior and exterior surfaces were to be white stucco. Another striking feature of the design was the movable partition of curved, painted plywood that could be used to separate the dining and living rooms. This device represented an evolution of the sliding partition in Breuer's House for a Sportsman or the Boroschek apartment. Its form was likely influenced by the curved wall in the dining room of Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat House and the curved screen wall in the dining room of Le Corbusier's Villa Stein. Breuer had enlisted a local Palm Springs architect, John Porter Clark, to oversee the construction, but Hilde and her husband, David, divorced in 1939. The house was never built.