The Cree House is Frey’s most intact residential work, aside from his own home. For Modernism Week, Mark Davis of Modern Home Design outfitted the house with midcentury modern furnishings, art, and objects.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LANCE GERBER
Albert Frey blew into Palm Springs in the fall of 1934. He was barely 31, all limbs and ideas, eager to leave an imprint out West. The Swiss-born architect arrived by way of New York, where he turned down a partnership deal from his former boss, Philip Goodwin, to drive across the country and study the shifting landscape of American architecture. (The pair would later collaborate on the design of the Museum of Modern Art building in Manhattan.) It was the hottest year on record, and newspaper headlines heralded ominous dust storms throughout the heartland, but that didn’t stop Frey from fleeing the bustle of the Big Apple, eyes fixated on the magnificently barren California desert. That was Frey. He’d lived in three countries before landing at Ellis Island in 1930. Until he settled in Palm Springs, the wunderkind didn’t stay anywhere long.
Frey’s actual partner and former East Coast housemate, A. Lawrence Kocher, had a brother, J.J., who’d taken up residence in the Coachella Valley two decades earlier. A retired physician, J.J. started a real estate development and insurance firm and needed an office. Kocher and Frey heeded the call with a bilevel cube of a building, finished in 1934, geometrically reflecting the slow-stepping horizon line of the surrounding San Jacinto Mountains. It was stark white, a severe departure from the existing brick storefront that J.J. had built with help from the indigenous Cahuilla — and was among the first International Style buildings in the nascent resort town of Palm Springs.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The 1946-47 Raymond Loewy House.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Palm Springs City Hall, designed in 1952.
He was known to use affordable industrial materials of aluminum, glass, concrete, and steel, and his color palette most often reflected what he saw beyond the window panes, like the seasonal yellow of the brittlebush blooms that blanket the desert each spring.
Save for a short return to New York in the late 1930s to assist Goodwin with MoMA, Frey made Palm Springs his home until his death in 1998 at age 95. During his six decades in the Coachella Valley, he practiced for almost 20 years with fellow modernist John Porter Clark and collaborated with many local designers and builders. His prolific career spans more than 200 building designs, including the Aluminaire House (1931, with Kocher — originally built in New York, soon to be reconstructed in Palm Springs); the Raymond Loewy House in Palm Springs’ Little Tuscany neighborhood (1946, with Clark); Palm Springs City Hall (1952, with Clark, Robson Chambers, and E. Stewart Williams); the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club overlooking the Salton Sea (1959); and the iconic Tramway Gas Station that marks the northwest end of Palm Springs (1965, with Chambers — now the Palm Springs Visitor Information Center).
BILL ANDERSON/PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY. © J. PAUL GETTY TRUST. JULIUS SHULMAN PHOTOGRAPHY ARCHIVE RESEARCH LIBRARY AT THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES.
Frey’s Tramway Gas Station, photographed in 1965 by Bill Anderson.
The Cree House (1955)
Twenty years after completing the Kocher-Samson Building, Frey designed a 1,124-square-foot hillside abode for Raymond Cree, a local civic leader and former Riverside County school superintendent. Frey was fresh off a two-month tour of Eurasia. He had lived through a second World War, a six-year marriage, and a divorce, and as Joseph Rosa describes in his book Albert Frey, Architect, the — by this time, established — modernist master was entering a new phase in his career. Where past projects would have nestled quietly amid flatter outcrops, the Cree House dares to ride the edge of the mountain and even project off of it with a 600-square-foot deck wrapped in yellow corrugated fiberglass panels. A series of steel columns, known as pilotis, supports the structure and minimizes the overall impact to the land.
The design calls to mind Villa Savoye, a residence on the outskirts of Paris, France, that Frey assisted Le Corbusier with during his 10-month tenure in 1929, and it hints at more venturesome builds to come. Today, the well-preserved Cathedral City home appears very much the same as it would have when Cree, then in his early 80s, moved in. After decades shrouded from public view, the two-bedroom, two-bath property underwent a meticulous restoration and was unveiled to great acclaim during Modernism Week 2019.
In the living room, just off the entrance, a pair of floor-to-ceiling glass sliders flank the focal point fireplace. The prominent feature extends through the horizontal plane of the house and fuses to the hillside below. Frey and Cree designed it using stones excavated directly from the site. One slider opens to the formal front patio, which cantilevers over the driveway, doubling as a carport; the other to an informal gathering spot situated in the rocks.
A pass-through window in the kitchen allows conversation to flow through the house. It also frames a view of the original 1950s appliances, which have been painstakingly brought back to working order — a three-panel refrigerator from General Electric that’s fixed to the ceiling, installed to look like upper cabinets, and a Western Holly gas oven with a porthole window.
Rich shades of caramel, copper, and beige, lifted from the natural palette of the mountain, spill inside onto wood-paneled walls, cabinetry, carpet, and even the appliances, visually blurring the line between indoors and out. On the exterior, sage green paint camouflages the asbestos-cement siding, providing a fairly neutral backdrop for that pop of yellow on the deck. The result is a building that seems at once at odds and harmonious with its environment, an aesthetic choice that typifies the Desert Modern style.
© J. PAUL GETTY TRUST. JULIUS SHULMAN PHOTOGRAPHY ARCHIVE RESEARCH LIBRARY AT THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES.
A testament to the architect’s appreciation for nature, a large boulder protrudes into Frey House II, separating the bedroom from the living room.
Frey House II (1964)
If the Cree House respects its location by levitating above it on pilotis, Frey House II does so by safeguarding Mother Nature indoors. The architect’s 800-square-foot personal home — his second in the desert, where he lived until he died — is recognized for numerous design feats. Arguably, the most visually striking is the massive boulder jutting through the glass wall at the rear of the house; it serves as a divider between the shared living and sleeping areas. The most awe-inspiring, though, is the intentionality of Frey’s site selection and the subsequent sun study that he conducted prior to breaking ground.
© J. PAUL GETTY TRUST. JULIUS SHULMAN PHOTOGRAPHY ARCHIVE RESEARCH LIBRARY AT THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES.
At Frey House II, the swimming pool and deck also function as the roof of the carport.
Frey observed the valley from this perch for 34 years. In March 1995, at age 91, he sat down at his home with Jennifer Golub, co-author of the monograph Albert Frey House 1 + 2. Golub was taken with how little had changed in the home since its fabrication in the ’60s. It had the same brittlebush-yellow curtains, the same built-in furniture, and the same Swiss cowbell hanging at the entrance.
“You haven’t even acquired anything,” Golub told Frey. “Would you do anything differently if you were to make the house today?”
“I really haven’t thought about it,” the architect replied. “It’s pretty much the way I like it.” And decades later, Frey would be pleased to know that it still is, now under the care of the Palm Springs Art Museum.
• READ NEXT: Learn More About the Restoration of the Cree House.
enter the frey
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Albert Frey looks out from Frey House II in Palm Springs.
Tour Frey House II and The Cree House during Modernism Week, Feb. 17–27. Properties are accessible only by shuttle, and space is limited. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit palmspringslife.ca/freyxfrey.
Who Made it Happen:
Frey House II, Presented by TTK Represents
Sponsors: Herman Miller, Knoll, Modern Hacienda, Palm Springs Art Museum
The Cree House
Home staging by Mark Davis of Modern Home Design
The Estate Sale (sponsor)