Modern's everyman

PALM SPRINGS — JENNIFER CABALQUINTO and Howard Joyce already had put a deposit on a house in a gated golf community when their Realtor steered them to yet another new home, which she said was by architect William Krisel. "We'd never heard of Krisel," recalls Cabalquinto. "We were on our way home. Our infant son was fussing in his car seat. We didn't even want to go in."

They did it to please the agent. And a few minutes later, they emerged "totally in love with the place," Cabalquinto says. "It was instantaneous for both of us." The couple made an immediate full-price offer and moved into the just-built house seven months ago.

The design that so instantly enchanted them isn't actually new at all. It's a reproduction of a 1955 home by Krisel, updated by him to current codes and filled with 21st century technology. The open floor plan, the high beamed ceilings, the walls of glass and the clerestory windows that offer glimpses of sky and swaying palms are exactly as the architect envisioned 53 years ago.

Krisel, 83, and unflappably urbane, says he's lived too long to be shocked by anything. But 20 years have passed since he retired as a practicing architect, so he was "just a bit surprised" to be asked again to create plans for the little butterfly-roofed, post-and-beam structure that became a kind of signature Palm Springs residence half a century ago. In fact, if a developer follows through, a whole new colony of reproduction Krisels could rise in the desert. Besides the one bought by Cabalquinto and Joyce, three others already have been built.

Krisel never won as much acclaim as Richard Neutra or Albert Frey, architects who designed the extraordinary custom homes that defined midcentury desert modernism. But it was Krisel who helped to popularize it, bringing that same spirit to affordable housing for the middle class.

Working with the Alexander Construction company in the 1950s, Krisel saw 2,500 of his tract houses built in Palm Springs, nearly doubling the size of that city. Whole neighborhoods of his original homes still exist, as if in a time warp.

Wide, curving streets front gardens behind which Krisel carefully angled the houses in varying positions on their 100-foot-square lots. He alternated styles of roofs, so that each house looked different from its neighbor. A casual observer still might take these streets for charming communities of custom-built homes, but all were mass-produced and have the same floor plans, Krisel says.