The Kaufmann Desert House: Richard Neutra's Answer to the Desert

Few clients in the history of architecture commissioned two houses as consequential as the pair built for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. The Pittsburgh department store owner, whose family business was the Kaufmann's chain, had asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design Fallingwater in Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s. A decade later, for a winter retreat in Palm Springs, California, he chose a different architect and a different language. He chose Richard J. Neutra, the Austrian-American architect working in the International Style, in the desert. The connection came through Kaufmann's architect son, Edgar Kaufmann Jr. The house was designed and completed in 1946, and it became the work by which desert modernism is still measured.

With no drawings to work from, the restorers rebuilt Neutra's 1946 house almost entirely from photographs.

That a single client should commission landmark houses from Wright and then from Neutra is one of the suggestive facts of twentieth-century architecture. Kaufmann deliberately chose Neutra over Wright for this house, favouring an international modernist approach over Wright's organic style, even though Wright had designed Fallingwater for the same client a decade earlier. The desert house is not a repudiation of the Pennsylvania house. It is a second answer to the same question, asked in a different climate: what a modern house could be when it stopped imitating other buildings and started answering its site.

A pinwheel in stone and glass

Neutra planned the house as a pinwheel: a square central living and dining room with wings extending in the cardinal directions. The master bedroom reaches east, the kitchen and service rooms west by a covered breezeway, the guest bedrooms north, and to the south two covered walkways separated by a massive stone wall. The plan turns the house outward in every direction at once, toward sunrise and sunset, toward the pool terrace and the lawns that face the San Jacinto Mountains. It is a house with no back.

The construction is a hybrid of steel and wood, with glass walls and Utah buff stone, a buff sandstone quarried in Utah. Steel beams and columns carry the frame; 3-inch diameter steel columns stand in the open gloriette areas and where the large sliding glass doors needed support. Slab edges are coated with metal sheet. At 3,162 square feet, with five bedrooms and five bathrooms across two storeys, it is a substantial house that reads as light, its mass broken into wings and walls and screens.

The original desert landscape by the local landscaper Chester Moorten, known as Cactus Slim, of the Moorten Botanical Garden, set large boulders, cacti, palms and native plantings around the stone and glass. The house is oriented east to west to maximise the sunrise and sunset views. Four distinct courtyards were designed for specific uses, microclimates and privacy needs, so that the outdoor rooms of the house are as carefully planned as the indoor ones.

A machine for desert living

The most distinctive elements of the house are also its most practical. Radiant heating and cooling run through pipes embedded in the floor, continuing from the interior out to the exterior, so the boundary between inside and outside is thermally continuous; the concrete floor around the swimming pool extends the cooled surface into the landscape. The slatted, movable aluminium louvre fins that line the patios shade and cool the rooms during extreme heat and close the house up during sandstorms, adjusted by hand. Deep overhangs, courtyard microclimates and the east-west orientation complete a set of climate strategies designed for the harsh desert decades before passive cooling became fashionable.

This is the serious content of the house's beauty. The fins give the building its unmistakable rhythm, but they are working parts before they are decoration. The house was engineered for a climate that punishes inattention, and its elegance is the elegance of systems that work. Few houses of the period thought so completely about heat, wind and sun, and fewer still made the answers so visible.

Photographed into history

Julius Shulman's photographs of 1947, with the San Jacinto Mountains behind the glass and the pool, made the house famous, and Slim Aarons's 1970 photograph Poolside Gossip fixed it in the wider visual culture. It is widely described as the defining example of desert modernism and the catalyst for the postwar modernist building surge in Palm Springs, influencing Albert Frey, William Krisel and Donald Wexler. The Los Angeles Times has ranked it among the top ten houses in Los Angeles, and it is generally regarded as one of the most significant works of American residential architecture. It is also one of the most photographed private houses in the world, and the photographs, as it turned out, would one day save it.

After Kaufmann's death in 1955 the house stood vacant for several years. Later owners included the singer Barry Manilow and the San Diego Chargers owner Eugene V. Klein, and the house suffered ill-considered alterations: an enclosed patio, altered rooflines to hide air-conditioning units, removed interior walls and built-ins, floral wallpaper. The building that had been a precise instrument for desert living was being softened into something ordinary.

Rebuilt from photographs

By the time the investment manager Brent Harris and his wife Beth Edwards Harris, an architectural historian, bought the house in 1992 for 1.5 million dollars, it had sat on the market for more than three years as a possible teardown. The restoration by the firm Marmol Radziner is a preservation landmark in its own right. The original architectural drawings were lost, and the UCLA archives held none, so the team worked from Shulman's extensive 1947 and 1949 photographs, studying them with magnifying glasses to recover original conditions. Replacement stonework was mined from a Utah quarry to match the original. The Harrises bought four adjacent plots, one to the west, one to the east and two to the north, to re-establish the house's isolation in the desert landscape, and collaborated with Moorten's son to restore the garden. With no drawings to work from, the restorers rebuilt Neutra's 1946 house almost entirely from photographs.

The house's later history is a matter of public record and private discretion. It was offered at Christie's 2008 postwar and contemporary art auction with a 15 to 25 million dollar estimate; the final 15 million dollar bid fell through after a breach of terms by the buyer. As part of the Harrises' divorce settlement, Brent Harris holds sole title. It was listed quietly in October 2023 at 25 million dollars through Vista Sotheby's; no confirmed record of a subsequent sale was found in the sources consulted. It remains a private residence, designated a historic site in 1996 by the Palm Springs Historic Site Preservation Board and a Class 1 Historic Site of the City of Palm Springs. It opened to the public for the first time during Palm Springs Modernism Week, when landscape tour tickets sold out in three minutes; the year of that first opening was not verified in the sources consulted. There is no UNESCO listing. The house endures as Neutra built it: a pinwheel of stone, glass and steel, engineered for the desert and photographed into history, now preserved as the clearest statement of what desert modernism meant.

The desert as client

Neutra's achievement was to treat the desert not as a backdrop but as a client with its own requirements. The east-west orientation, the deep overhangs, the courtyards with their distinct microclimates, the radiant floors that carry cooling from inside to outside, the aluminium fins that close against sandstorms: each is an answer to a specific desert condition, and together they form a complete environmental system designed decades before the language of passive cooling existed. The house does not fight the desert. It negotiates with it, daily, by hand.

Kaufmann's two houses now stand as a matched pair in the history of the American house: Fallingwater, the organic masterpiece in the Pennsylvania woods, and the desert house, the International Style composition in the California sun, both commissioned by the same Pittsburgh merchant, both among the most significant works of American residential architecture. The client who gave Wright his greatest house gave Neutra his greatest desert house, and in doing so gave the century two different answers to the same question. The desert house remains a private residence, closed to the public except on the rare occasions of its Modernism Week openings, and that privacy is part of its preservation. It is still what Neutra built: a pinwheel of stone, glass and steel, engineered for heat and wind and sun, holding its own against the mountains.