Property of Mr. Arthur Elrod, Palm Springs, Ca | Architect: John Lautner

10/13/2025 10:36:00 PM

Some daring men climb mountains and, to mark each of their conquests, plant a flag in a pile of rocks at the top. With similar daring and enormous imagination, architect John Lautner conquered a cliff-like ridge in California's Palm Springs and planted among its rocks not a flagpole but a spectacular house for interior designer Arthur Elrod. Not a room in the house is either square or rectangular. The living room is round 60 feet in diameter-and through windows in its ceiling you get a view of distant mountain tops. The kitchen is roughly elliptical. In all, more than 100 feet of floor-to-ceiling glass walls. with no frames give sweeping panoramas of the desert. Huge boulders cropping naturally out of the site stand in for room walls or form part of the interior architecture.

What Mr. Elrod had asked for was a spacious one-level house that could serve, at one time or another, as private retreat, an exhilarating setting for entertaining, an efficient office-at- home and an inviting conference spot. What he got was a house of 5,700 square feet, all on one level, all in five rooms. Two of them a study-bedroom and the round living-dining room are enormous.

Perhaps the most daring concept of this daring house is the roof over the living room-a true, self-supporting dome of poured concrete, glass, and copper, cannily designed to welcome views and natural light into the air-conditioned interior. From within the room, this canopy looks like a giant pop art sculpture of a daisy. Radiating from its center are nine huge petals of concrete with wedge-shaped spaces between them. Two of the spaces are filled in with glass, making magnificent sky windows. Each of the others is roofed by a triangular copper panel which is joined to its concrete neighbor along one side, but tilted upward on the other to allow for a band of slit-like clerestories.

The living room is completely round except for one huge scene- snaring glass wall composed of panels arranged in a zigzag (to cut down reflections) well inside the perimeter of the circle. Since the glass reaches clear to the dome roof, part of the dome, including part of the two triangular sky windows, is actually outside the room and forms an overhang for the terrace. Because the glass is mitred and joined with an epoxy, no frames interrupt the 160 degrees of panoramic views-magnificent at sunset when the town begins to sprinkle the valley with lights, and Mt. San Jacinto looms against the western sky. The mobile is by Mimi Kornaza.