Posted on October 24, 2024 by Camila Stella

Albert Frey Bel Vista House: Visit a Palm Springs icon

Albert Frey Bel Vista House: Visit a Palm Springs icon

Albert Frey’s restoration of a Bel Vista home has earned homeowner Todd Hays the 2024 Palm Springs Modern Committee Architectural Preservation Award, which will be presented at a ceremony on October 19, 2024. It’s a celebration that comes just in time to preview Palm Springs Modernism Week 2025, which kicks off on the 24th.

One of 15 postwar homes designed in 1945 by Frey (an important Palm Springs architect and proponent of modernist architecture) on a block near Sunrise Way and East Tachevah Drive (in collaboration with developers Culver and Sallie Stevens Nichols), Bel Vista House, 1150 N. Calle Rolph, is one of three that remain relatively intact. Hays bought and restored the other two. The houses are all identical, but placed differently on each property—essentially “flipped and rotated,” Hays explains.

(Image credit: Mike Carreiro)

Discover the restoration of an Albert Frey Bel Vista House

The simple but elegant houses – made possible by government funding through the New Deal’s Homeowners’ Loan Corporation – illustrate what architectural historian Alan Hess wrote of the architect’s oeuvre: “Frey’s architecture is an unusual mix of the visionary and the everyday.”‘

While works by the “father of desert modernism” can be found throughout Palm Springs, including the Loewy House and Frey House II, which sit dramatically on the hillside above Tahquitz Canyon Way, Bel Vista’s rowhouses are the only example of mass-produced ones Low-rise buildings – the most cost-effective living space that Frey has ever created.

Albert Frey's Belvista House in Palm Springs, modernist modest home

(Image credit: Mike Carreiro)

The project was a culmination of ideas he had been exploring for decades. According to architectural historian Peter Moruzzi: “During Frey’s tenure in the offices of Le Corbusier, particularly in his work on Centrosoyuz in Moscow and Villa Savoye in France, Frey’s association with contrasting curved and rectilinear forms in architecture first appears.”

“The Bel Vista House at 1150 N. Calle Rolph reflects Frey’s interest in juxtaposing square masses and cylindrical elements by utilizing the exterior curvilinear block wall and overall square massing of the house.”

Albert Frey's Belvista House in Palm Springs, modernist modest home

(Image credit: Mike Carreiro)

These theories of low-cost mass housing were further developed when he and A. Lawrence Kocher wrote their seminal work, published in Architectural Record in 1931, “Real Estate Subdivisions for Low-Cost Housing.” It advocated for affordable housing on small square lots, differentiated from lot to lot by a staggered arrangement. Frey’s research continued in 1934 with his work as a designer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and his Alluminaire House the same year.

Hays, who bought the house in June 2022 from a family that had owned it for 45 years, says, “Fortunately, the structure was almost intact.” Much of the work was removing years of alterations and giving the house the Freys charm “To give back original architecture.”

Albert Frey's Belvista House in Palm Springs, modernist modest home

(Image credit: Mike Carreiro)

He removed the wooden casement windows and rebuilt the curved driveway, but retained the 1992 pool and 1972 bathroom. The devil was in the details, which Hays meticulously restored and repainted the house in its original color palette, Frey’s signature Encelia green.

“With all the doors and windows now meeting Frey’s original specifications,” he says, “the house is incredibly light and bright inside, just as he intended.”

Albert Frey's Belvista House in Palm Springs, modernist modest home

(Image credit: Mike Carreiro)

The home’s central core facilitates natural circulation, and nearly every room features an exterior door—including several made of solid glass—that brings the outdoors indoors.

Albert Frey's Belvista House in Palm Springs, modernist modest home

(Image credit: Mike Carreiro)

Hay’s restoration – which earned the house designation as a Class 1 historic site – lovingly reinforces Frey’s original intent and reinvigorates an underappreciated champion of simple but elegant desert living.

Albert Frey's Belvista House in Palm Springs, modernist modest home

(Image credit: Mike Carreiro)