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FeedThe Cottage the Eisenhowers Called Home
One Man's cottage is another man's castle, in this case the "Presidential Cottage" at Eldorado Country Club.
A few of the forty palm trees around the Eisenhower home (landscaping is by Floyd Matthews of Monrovia) are seen in this front view from the street - it was no inexpensive job, "but it went together very easy."
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT PAXTON
( Republished from the February 1962 Issue of Palm Springs Life Magazine. )
One man's cottage is another man's castle, and the one they call the "Presidential Cottage" at Eldorado Country Club is as snug a castle as any you'll find this side of the Rhine. Located on the eleventh fairway of the country club's golf course, it's the place that former President and Mrs. Dwight Eisenhower are calling home through their winter vacation in the desert.
(The Eisenhowers are leasing it—for an unannounced sum—until spring; the home is owned by Eldorado Properties, Incorporated, and will be available to other distinguished lessees when the Eisenhowers move out.)
Designed by Los Angeles architect Welton Beckett and constructed by H. M. Eversz of Rancho Mirage (who also built Eldorado's clubhouse), it cost $175,000 and was three months in the building.
There are six thousand square feet of roof and forty-two hundred square feet of living area under it. There are four bedrooms (including the servants'), six bathrooms, a den, dining room and bar, kitchen and service room, plus, of course, the living room.
But it isn't size that makes a home. It is such details as the presidential silhouettes chosen by the decorator, Mrs. Teddy Gomez, for the walls of the bar; they are old lithographs by E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, and among the previous occupants of the White House that Ike may
contemplate there are Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren.
It is the luxury of Mamie's bedroom (as builder Eversz remarked, "the fanciest room in the house is given to the gals always"), all in white and light grays, with built-in, retractable arm rests in the double bed and remote control television (one of three sets in the house), with one set of picture windows framing the golf course fairway and the other looking out on the swimming pool (a sixteen-by-thirty-two-foot rectangle); and the feminine opulence of her bathroom, in chartreuse and white, with silk paper on the walls ($12.50 a roll), a covey of angels hanging from the ceiling (which is a luminous plastic that filters the lighting), a marble dressing top and a sunken tub of a specially-designed tile. (By contrast, General Eisenhower's bedroom and his den, handsomely paneled in butternut, are Spartan in their simplicity and absence of frills.)
It is the raised marble hearth of the living room fireplace and the striking candelabra on the rock facing.
A HIGH fidelity sound system is wired into all areas of the home (and controlled from either Ike's or Mamie's bedroom as well as from a central control panel); the ceilings are high all through the house (at Mrs. Eisenhower's request, Eversz relates, to avert any claustrophobic feeling), ranging up to fifteen feet in the huge living room; and the kitchen would be any housewife's delight, with its push-button electric range (the house is all electric except for two gas furnaces and a gas jet in the fireplace) in a central cooking "island."
The basic construction is frame and stucco, with a facing of brown rock (forty tons of it, hauled from the Chocolate Mountains by the Sal ton Sea) on the front or street side of the house. (The Eisenhower neighbors include Raymond Osbrink, owner of a Los Angeles steel foundry, and Robert Cannon, president of the Cannon Electric Company in Los Angeles.) The laminated beams that stretch across the living room ceiling are forty-six feet long, and they rest on wood posts — which, as building superintendent Herman Sylvania explains, will avoid the cracks in the wall that sometimes result from wood on steel because of their varying temperature expansion rates.
Although the largest home Eversz has built, it presented no particular problems.
As he put it: "It was not inexpensive to put together, but it went together very easy."
Eldorado Country Club
46000 Fairway Drive
Indian Wells, CA 92210
(760) 346-8081
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