#midcentury-house

#midcentury-house

Iceboxes were large lined, insulated wooden cupboards built to store ice, food, and drinks. The ice would usually be placed on the upper shelf, with the food and drinks below, and the cool air from the melting ice would help to keep everything nice and chilled.

The Walker Guest House, a 24-foot cube designed by Paul Rudolph in 1953, is now reassembled in West Hollywood and available for $2 million.

When you design your home with intentionality, you are essentially 'hard-coding' healthy behaviors into your daily rhythm. Health outcomes are the result of thousands of micro-decisions—so in his own home, he prioritized spaces like the kitchen, whose open layout makes cooking a pleasure, and the gym, centrally located.

I knew I needed help, so I put an ad in MySpace. A woman named Beth responded and I met her for an interview at a coffee shop. As we talked I realized she had all the skills I didn't have. She had a design degree. She had business savvy and technical skills. And she was wildly smart and more importantly, kind.

"It has been estimated that one million five hundred thousand houses each year for a period of 10 years will be needed to relieve the urgent housing problem of this country. The enormity of such a need cannot even be partially satisfied by building techniques as we have known and used them in the past."

When complete in December 1999, the 22-story building will have floor-to-ceiling windows of silver blue-gray glass in place of its concrete facade and aggregate panels. The structure will feature an upturned metal canopy on the penthouse floor that will be visible from much of the Westside when the building is illuminated.

The Kappe House in Rustic Canyon, California has been listed for sale, bringing newly released photographs of its midcentury interiors into view. Designed in 1967 as the personal residence of architect Ray Kappe - who co-founded SCI-Arc together with Thom Mayne of Morphosis - the house stands as one of Southern California's most studied works of residential modernism. Set on a steep, wooded site in Pacific Palisades, the structure hovers above the hillside on a framework of vertical concrete supports and expansive redwood beams.

With their red-tile roofs and stucco walls so commonplace that they've become part of the landscape, the homes of the Spanish Colonial Revival tapped the climate, local materials and an idealized view of history to become the signature style of Southern California.

Designed by noted residential architect Roland E. Coate, the home was built in 1926 for Annie Wilson, daughter of pioneering Southern California businessman and politician Benjamin Wilson, for whom Mt. Wilson is named. The gently sloping 1-acre-plus property was once part of the vast holdings of George S. Patton, father of the famed U.S. general.

Some people have a negative perception of prefabricated homes because they think that implies a cheap mobile home. But it's actually possible to do very high-quality work in the controlled environment of a factory. And it's far faster and more reliable than doing the work on site.