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As the legend has it, Frank Sinatra walked into the Palm Springs, California architecture firm Williams, Williams, & Williams in May 1947. A white sailor cap perched on his head, an ice cream cone in his hand, he uttered those three words that would later change California architecture forever: “I wanna house.”
On what would have been Sinatra’s 104th birthday, CR digs into the history of Sinatra’s first home.
The person who greeted him was architect E. Stewart Williams, and Sinatra’s mid-century home would become the young architect’s first commission for a stand-alone residence. Originally, the singer wanted a Georgian-style revival mansion perched in the desert, columns, stone balustrades, and all, to celebrate his newfound success and wealth. And he wanted it done by Christmas. Williams wasn’t having it, though. As his brother Roger, also an architect at the firm, remembers, “He said ‘Frank, what we’ll do, we’re gonna design this thing you’re talking about but I’m going to lay out what I think fits the desert a little better and let you decide.’” Williams drew up plans for the Georgian project, but also assembled plans for a sleek glass, open-concept house. Sinatra chose the latter. “We were so glad because we’d have been ruined right then and there if we’d been forced to build that here in the desert,” Roger laughed years later.
Sinatra’s house, at 1148 East Alejo Road in Palm Springs, would become known as Twin Palms, named after the two adjacent, leaning palm trees perched together on the property (Sinatra reportedly hung a Jack Daniel’s flag between them when it was time for cocktails). Instead of an opulent Georgian, the home was a modern ranch house, with four bedrooms and seven bathrooms. Positioned at an angle, it had a flat roof, a chimney of Arizona flagstone, natural wood interior walls, and glass exterior walls that embedded the home in the landscape of the neighboring desert. Floor to ceiling windows in the master bedroom, which had its own wing, faced Mt. San Jacinto. Although Williams maintained that it was merely an accident, a piano-shaped swimming pool sunk into the patio, with shadows apparently resembling piano keys at certain angles. Williams made the open-concept living room and extensive patio space for the entertaining he knew Sinatra liked to do. The impressive structure cost 0,000 to build at the time, or the equivalent of about .7 million today.
Palm Springs was still a sleepy area then. In the 1940s and 1950s, it became host to a variety of other major stars like Bob Hope and Cary Grant in its exclusive “Movie Colony.” But Sinatra was among the first, and with Twin Palms, E. Stewart Williams built an initial design that would come to characterize the California-borne “desert modernism” style. Williams’ famed Coachella Savings and Loan (1955), Santa Fe Savings and Loan (1960), and Palm Springs Art Museum (1976) buildings would follow later on.
Sinatra lived at Twin Palms until 1957. In that time, the house saw fabulous parties, yes, but also the dissolution of his first marriage to Nancy Barbuto and his second marriage to actress Ava Gardner. In his famously dramatic fights with Gardner, Sinatra was said to have thrown a champagne bottle against a sink and cracked it–a fracture that still exists in the sink today. While the home’s interiors were updated this year, it’s still a bastion to design of the time, and can even be rented out for vacations, weddings, events, and photoshoots. And don’t worry, the memory of Sinatra is alive and well in the house, in not just the original architecture but in sound: his recording equipment and sound system were recently reinstalled, so even the legendary voice of Ol’ Blue Eyes is never too far away.
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