A Modernist Sensibility

I returned recently from a weekend trip to Palm Springs, where my friend Steve and I visited one of my long-time friends from the years in Houston that now seem distant. One of our hosts, a lover of things mid 20th century, entertained us in the comfortable, spare surroundings of a 1970s-vintage home built in the modernist style and designed by renowned architect Stan Sackley, who was a Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesen student. Houses built from the mid 1940s through the mid 60s essentially doubled the size of this desert resort, and stamped the place as a Mecca for modernist architecture. A significant number of these homes were built by the father/son team of George and Robert Alexander.

As you enter the landing just inside the double front doors of my friends’ home, your eyes are immediately pulled into a large living space, a step down from the landing. Divided into two parts sharing an open fireplace, the living space looks out through an expanse of glass, inviting in the outdoors, including a swimming pool and amazing citrus trees. In the distance are the mountains. It was my first trip to the California desert, and I didn’t even expect mountains. But there they are, no small part of the landscape.

I don’t really understand spare spaces. At least, I don’t understand them in a way that has allowed me to create one for myself. A lover of the primitive arts—furniture, pottery, textiles, paintings, Folk art—my dwellings have always been over the top. In my parlance, one good basket deserves another, and another. And on goes the story. As we sat having drinks in the smaller of the two living spaces on Friday evening, Mr. Sinatra at his best from a collection of CDs that match the spirit of the home, one of our hosts commented, “this has become my favorite room in the house.”

I looked around and smiled, “yes, this is sweet,” my favorite new way to describe that which pleases me and touches my sensibilities in the nicest way. A classic Eames Lounge and Ottoman sat across the space from me. I have this set, produced by Herman Miller, based on a 1956 design by Charles and Ray Eames. It actually looks good placed among primitive art. An example of the Eames chair lives in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In our hosts’ home, other significant examples of modern furniture, whose designers remain largely a foreign language to me—Bertoia, Breuer, Knoll—were cleanly arranged in rooms that can appropriately be described as lean. A large piece of abstract art is the focal point of any wall in this Palm Springs get-away. Few objects adorn tables, credenzas and built-in shelves—unlike my own homes where objects are layered and stacked, a visual feast for those of my natural bent.

More than a time or two over the years I have commented that a minimalist lives somewhere deep inside me. But I have to add with a chuckle, he’s going to have a real struggle surfacing through my 35 year collecting habit. In a way, I think I’m ready for his appearance. Here in Santa Fe, I love visiting the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, where for now the exhibit includes photographs of her Abiquiu home, in which rooms speak clearly and appropriately to the modernist spirit in this desert land. As I look around my micro space, what I call home for most of the year, I imagine the place swept clean, and I remember it 15 months ago as the one-bedroom model in The Reserve at Santa Fe—lean and sleek. It didn’t take long for me to achieve my layered and stack signature look. I’m thinking, though, that I just might be ready to learn another language—Bertoia, Breuer, Knoll. I think I’m ready for the middle of the 20th century.

A Modernist Sensibility—Santa Fe, New Mexico (January 28, 2009)
R. Harold Hollis