The white Eero Saarinen Tulip dining table, their one "serious" piece, was chosen for its period looks. "We love midcentury modern, but we didn't want to be cliche about it," Cabalquinto says. "I tried for clean lines, no clutter, and pieces we won't worry about when our son starts climbing on them."
Glints of pale green glass in the floor lent her the color scheme: a soft-green sofa and two patterned barrel chairs that swivel, so guests can face the kitchen or the living room.
A Takashi Murakami lithograph hangs above the fireplace. Most stunning is a colorful canvas divided into three segments of similar abstract patterns. It's not an artwork, exactly, Cabalquinto says. "It's a picture of the structure of our family's DNA -- Howard's, mine and our son Jack's."
THE couple's "keeper" would never have been built if it weren't for two Canadian brothers, Bob and Michael Friedman, who wanted to escape with their parents from Calgary's winter chill. For one month they rented a Palm Springs house that happened to be a vintage Krisel design. What beguiled them was nothing so superficial as its good looks.
"It was the extraordinary experience of living there," Bob Friedman says. "The floor plan was open but gave us each so much privacy. There was a great relationship between indoors and out. The walls of sliding glass doors, the clerestory windows -- looking up, you saw the tops of palms and mountains. Or else the garden and pool. From almost every room there was outdoor access. We felt like we were part of the landscape."
Being builders, he says, they realized "there was genius in the simple post-and-beam design, like a child's puzzle you could easily fit together. Krisel had pared the house down to essentials."
They phoned Krisel, who since his retirement from active practice has been doing forensic architecture, which focuses on investigating structural flaws in buildings. The brothers asked him to use his original plans to duplicate the house they loved so much. Krisel relented, but only after he had signed a contract that gave him "total design control over every inch of the project. Not even a nail could be changed from its original spot without my approval," Krisel says.
He's not floored by the renaissance of his early work, he says. "After all, modernism isn't a style or a trend. It's a language, a philosophy. The components of a structure become its ornamentation."
After Krisel drew plans to meet current codes, which include increased insulation and double-paned glass, a crew took only four months to build the house that Cabalquinto and Joyce purchased, Bob Friedman says. Current economic conditions have caused the Friedmans to put mass construction on hold, but they hope to build a new community of Krisels in the desert.
Krisel shrugs at the notion. "My contract with them is for five years and 500 houses," he says. "I've already designed about 40,000 dwellings in my career. I don't get too excited about a few more."
bettijane.levine@latimes.com
