Latest / The iDesign Lab Podcast / The House That Vanished: The Shocking Story Behind America’s Modernist Homes With George Smart

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The House That Vanished: The Shocking Story Behind America’s Modernist Homes With George Smart · The iDesign Lab Podcast

• 0:00
  Voice Over: This is iDesign Lab, a podcast where creativity and curiosity meet style and design.
• 0:06
  Voice Over: Curator of interiors, furnishings, and lifestyles.
• 0:09
  Voice Over: Hosted by Tiffany Woolley, an interior designer and a style enthusiast, along with her serial entrepreneur husband Scott.
• 0:17
  Voice Over: iDesign Lab is your ultimate design podcast where we explore the rich and vibrant world of design and its constant evolution in style and trends.
• 0:43
  TIffany Woolley: Today on the iDesign Lab podcast, we are joined by George Smart, founder and CEO of U.S.
• 0:51
  TIffany Woolley: Modernist, who has spent years discovering, documenting, and championing extraordinary modernist homes and the architects behind them.
• 1:01
  TIffany Woolley: He's not just preserving houses, he's preserving history and the stories of how we choose to live.
• 1:09
  TIffany Woolley: Welcome, George, to the iDesign Lab podcast.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm happy to be here.
• 1:14
  TIffany Woolley: I'm so excited to dive into this conversation because, as a design enthusiast, you know, mid-century modern especially has such a strong part in my heart.
• 1:26
  TIffany Woolley: But tell us where you started.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a dark and stormy night in January of 2007.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I was minding my own business.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: I had a very fine career.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was living in a nice place.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I went online and started Googling ideas for a new house.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: And a couple hours later, I discovered that in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I grew up, there was this unbelievable house called a Catalano House, which was the second most famous house in our state after Biltmore.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately, this thing was allowed to be destroyed in 2001.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just heartbroken.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I had never gotten to see this house.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it was fantastic.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: People can Google Catalano House Raleigh and see it.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, about two or three hours later, I had this flash uh that I had actually been to the house when I was six years old.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: My dad, who was an architect, had taken me there and several other places, and so I started making a list of houses that had been destroyed in Raleigh or that were endangered.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that list turned into a website for the locality.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: Then we went statewide in 2013, then we went national in 2015, and now we're the largest website in the world for mid-century modern houses.
• 3:00
  TIffany Woolley: That is such a fascinating story and a fascinating take.
• 3:05
  TIffany Woolley: Like, explain to the audience what is mid-century modern?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: So, mid-century is just a period of time.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: So let's say roughly 1940 to 1970.
• 3:18
  TIffany Woolley: Okay.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then modern or modernist is a style of architecture.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: So a lot of houses that were designed during that period were of this modernist style.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: And they were very popular.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: They were published everywhere.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, quite a niche.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: And it was very much a niche because only about one-fourth of one percent of the housing stock is modernist, still to this day.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: But these were new and hot and sexy, and people wanted to have them in resort areas.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: They wanted them for their primary homes.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they were very popular in California and Florida, and they became popular in North Carolina because we hired an all-modernism all-the-time dean to our new architecture school.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I've found so far with my team about 6,200 modernist houses in North Carolina.
• 4:16
  TIffany Woolley: That is so cool.
• 4:18
  Scott Woolley: So, has this become like a full-time business for you?
• 4:22
  Scott Woolley: Well, my wife refers to it as an extended seizure.
• 4:26
  Scott Woolley: Oh, okay.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: What did you do before you got into this?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: So, for 25 years, I was a management consultant, uh, specializing in strategic planning and leadership development, working for major corporations, uh, getting paid exceptionally well for them to ignore all my advice.
• 4:45
  Scott Woolley: And then you made a pivoting life change to doing this.
• 4:50
  Scott Woolley: Slowly.
• 4:51
  Scott Woolley: It took a couple of years.
• 4:52
  Scott Woolley: It's really interesting.
• 4:54
  TIffany Woolley: It is.
• 4:55
  TIffany Woolley: And like, what do you what is where continues to drive that passion?
• 5:00
  TIffany Woolley: Is it just making sure these homes last?
• 5:04
  TIffany Woolley: Some of my earlier childhood memories are in these homes.
• 5:09
  TIffany Woolley: Like I remember my parents, my grandparents, and it's so, you know, it's so distinct, you know, the style of the furniture, the materials that were used, the windows, the way the houses were clad, and the roof structure.
• 5:28
  TIffany Woolley: There's so many like niche points, I guess, or materials that were used then.
• 5:34
  TIffany Woolley: What has been so fascinating to you as you've dove in into this process?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I am the CEO of US Martist.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: We're a nonprofit for preserving these houses.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason why we're doing it is because if you don't document a house and why it's important, it's more likely to get torn down.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: So as we go through and find more of these houses and put together their histories, we're going to be the first place that people find when an owner, buyer, seller, or realtor types in an address, and now they can get information about why that house was significant.
• 6:12
  Scott Woolley: So are people reaching out to you saying, I just purchased a home and you should be looking at it, or are you finding the houses?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, all the time.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Every day.
• 6:22
  Scott Woolley: So is there a value that changes from a standpoint of the value of a home?
• 6:27
  Scott Woolley: Like, like, you know, we deal with a lot of homes that are historic.
• 6:32
  Scott Woolley: So how does that affect?
• 6:35
  Scott Woolley: Does it is it does it do they get stamped a certain way that like a registry per se?
• 6:40
  Scott Woolley: Yeah, like an historic home in South Florida, you know, the to get permits and so forth to remodel and and do anything to it is a whole nother additional step in the process.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: So we're not a regulatory agency or uh uh an honorific kind of agency.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, people do like seeing their houses on the site because it associates them with all the other research.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: On the U.S.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: modernist site, we have about 31,000 houses so far across the country.
• 7:14
  TIffany Woolley: Amazing.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: And with with photos and stories, and are they still around?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: Have they been renovated?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: Have they been destroyed?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: All of that.
• 7:24
  Scott Woolley: You know, when I hear about a modernism house, I always think about a flat roof and lots of glass.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, that's that's there are four characteristics of a modernist house.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: The first one is a flat or low-pitched roof.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: The second one is lots of openings in the house, so big windows, courtyards, atriums, skylights, things like that to bring nature in.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: And the third one is an unusual geometry.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just a box with a pitched roof.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then number four is an open floor plan.
• 7:59
  Scott Woolley: Right.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: Now, back in the day, uh in the 30s, say, most houses were built with lots of little rooms that you would seal off with doors, and you might have to heat those rooms in the winter or not.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the advent of central air and heat made all kinds of new architecture possible.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so you had the open floor plan of your kitchen going into your dining room, going into your living room, and making a much more relaxed space for living.
• 8:28
  TIffany Woolley: And it was also like the introduction at that time of new materials like Tarrazzo.
• 8:34
  TIffany Woolley: I always think of Tarrazzo with mid-century modern.
• 8:38
  TIffany Woolley: I think of Mica, you know, the kitchens.
• 8:42
  TIffany Woolley: And I personally, who spends a lot of time on social media, I love following any of these people rehaving these homes and bringing them back to their glory and really working to preserve the intent that they originally had.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the people that are taking these houses and renovating them are really the heroes of modernism because it's it's not an easy process, it's time consuming, it costs money, but in the end, you have something that's really special.
• 9:17
  TIffany Woolley: You really do.
• 9:18
  TIffany Woolley: And I feel like it was it at that time, it was so intentional in the evolution of the construction, the whole process.
• 9:27
  TIffany Woolley: Like I said, the materials that were used were so almost like a time capsule.
• 9:33
  TIffany Woolley: Like they were so intentional in its purity.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's true of many architectural styles when they start out.
• 9:43
  TIffany Woolley: Yes.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, for instance, the Victorians of the 1880s through the early part of the 20th century, they were very intentional too, very ornate.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, everything had a purpose throughout the house.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: And they went through their big era in the 1960s, where people were working to save those.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: And now pretty much all the ones that needed to be saved have.
• 10:07
  Scott Woolley: Which is such a wonderful I always kind of look at them and think to myself, they look a little futuristic.
• 10:16
  Scott Woolley: Am I off base in saying that?
• 10:18
  TIffany Woolley: Well, I think of the Brady bunch.
• 10:20
  TIffany Woolley: You think of you know these very iconic homes.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, to his point, um, they do look like the future.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: And and that's one of the issues that city councils and committees have when it's time for historical designation.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because typically a house is up for that when it's at 50 years old.
• 10:42
  Scott Woolley: Right.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: But you look at some of these houses and they may be a little bit worn, but they still look very, very current or futuristic.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_04: It's true.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: We had a benefit event in Miami at a house called the Jetsons House.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: And it it could be built 30 years from now and nobody would know.
• 11:02
  Scott Woolley: Yeah, the Jetsons would be a good example of I would kind of classify or think of it.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's like the future.
• 11:09
  Scott Woolley: But then when I think about it from an architectural standpoint, I think the one name that for me stands out is Frank Lloyd.
• 11:16
  Scott Woolley: Right Wright.
• 11:18
  Scott Woolley: Am I correct?
• 11:19
  Scott Woolley: Yes.
• 11:19
  Scott Woolley: And that every pretty much everything that I've seen that he's done really falls into this category, correct?
• 11:26
  Scott Woolley: Uh pretty much.
• 11:27
  Scott Woolley: But I believe, didn't he feel like he wasn't creating in that category?
• 11:33
  Scott Woolley: I can't, I don't remember.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: So Frank Lloyd Wright had a very long career.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh lots of ups and downs.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: He went through uh a prairie style stage early in his career after working with uh Louis Sullivan in Chicago.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: He established the tally essential campuses where he taught students his style.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: He had an enormous ego.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: And during the last 10 years of his life, he was in the early days of television.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: So he got on television quite a lot, and his popularity just exploded.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: He's still the one architect that most people can name.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 12:12
  TIffany Woolley: It's so true.
• 12:13
  TIffany Woolley: You're right.
• 12:14
  TIffany Woolley: He was so impactful.
• 12:16
  Scott Woolley: Well, a lot of his became a most iconic photos of pictures of the different houses that he did.
• 12:23
  Scott Woolley: So, what's the real difference then of a modern house and a modernist house?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: Is there well it's it's just a modern house is a house as built today.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: A modernist house has those four characteristics that I mentioned.
• 12:41
  TIffany Woolley: And so what does your process look like?
• 12:44
  TIffany Woolley: So you and what is your ultimate goal?
• 12:46
  TIffany Woolley: I understand is to preserve these, but how what does your process look like when you're putting them on the website and the whole history behind it?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: So we scour all kinds of data sources.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: We have an online collection of almost every architecture magazine ever published in the United States.
• 13:10
  unknown: Wow.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: We have scanned six million pages since 2013 and made them text searchable for the first time.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: So that people can go in, let's say that their grandmother's house they knew was published in House and Home in April of 1954.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: They can go right to that issue, boom, see the article, see the photos, um, get all that history information right there.
• 13:35
  Scott Woolley: That is so special.
• 13:37
  Scott Woolley: So you've documented thousands of homes.
• 13:40
  Scott Woolley: Is there a home that really stands out for you?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, there's so many.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: So many.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um I I can tell you that as a category, the ones that really make my heart sing are the smaller ones.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, you're talking maybe a two-bedroom, one or two-bath house, immaculately detailed, uh, with those terrazzo floors she mentioned earlier, and bright light everywhere in some kind of location where you have a vista.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: It could be over to the ocean, it could be to a river, it could be to mountains or to woods.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, those to me resonate a lot more than say a 10,000 square foot house somewhere.
• 14:28
  TIffany Woolley: So, who are some of the other iconic architects of this time?
• 14:34
  TIffany Woolley: Scott mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright.
• 14:36
  TIffany Woolley: What are some other names that might not be as recognizable?
• 14:40
  TIffany Woolley: And were they all over, like California, Florida, North Carolina, or did they kind of stay in their regions?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Frank Lloyd Wright was across the country, and most other architects who achieved a certain level of fame started getting commissions elsewhere as well.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Richard Neutra uh was based in California but did houses all across the country.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh John Lautner, whose houses are famous for being in TV shows and movies.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, his work was principally in California, but he did projects elsewhere.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then Rudolf Schindler, who was uh a colleague of Richard Neutra's, uh, again was mostly in California, but um his houses as well as all of these other architects are still very highly prized.
• 15:33
  TIffany Woolley: And did they mainly focus on residential, or did they do, as we mentioned before, some hotels or like you know, commercial buildings as well?
• 15:43
  TIffany Woolley: Palm Beach even has some great commercial buildings that I just I'm like in awe every time I drive by.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it kind of goes like this almost all architects do a few houses.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: But you can't make money doing houses unless you kind of hit it big and get the kind of national attention where everybody wants you to do their house.
• 16:08
  Scott Woolley: Right.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: So you'll have a few architects of excuse me, you'll have a few houses in every architect's portfolio, and then they have to do the commercial work.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: The shopping centers and the post offices and the schools and the churches and all those other kinds of projects.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: And those are great too.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: And and all those architects I mentioned did do those kinds of commercial projects.
• 16:28
  TIffany Woolley: And all of this is on your curated website.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: All of the houses, yes.
• 16:34
  TIffany Woolley: Okay, houses.
• 16:35
  TIffany Woolley: So go ahead.
• 16:36
  TIffany Woolley: No, I was gonna say, what would be an iconic commercial mid-century modernist building or hotel that we are familiar with today?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh, Morris Lapidus in Miami did the Fountain Blows and Eden Rock hotels, which are incredibly iconic.
• 16:58
  TIffany Woolley: I mean, in Miami does have so much.
• 17:00
  TIffany Woolley: We call, I mean, they say Art Deco down there a lot, but that's really not the same, right?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh no, that was an earlier period.
• 17:09
  TIffany Woolley: That was an earlier period.
• 17:10
  TIffany Woolley: So my whole thing when we get a project that comes in is kind of restoring the initial intent and bringing these, you know, back to life and using maybe some updated materials, but with those same, you know, intentions.
• 17:29
  TIffany Woolley: Is there materials we mentioned, Terrazzo, but even furniture, like when you stumble into these gems that you're working with, is there items that you just get in awe of?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, all the time.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you know, you you find these storage units that families have had for decades, and you open them up, and there's a whole stack of Eams chairs, for instance.
• 17:57
  TIffany Woolley: What a fun job to be part of that.
• 18:00
  TIffany Woolley: So, what does every day look like?
• 18:02
  TIffany Woolley: Is this what you're primarily doing now, full-time?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 18:05
  TIffany Woolley: Okay.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm the CEO and executive director for a national nonprofit.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: We have fundraising events all over the country.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we'll be having one coming up in October in Delray that we'll talk about.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: And uh usually I wake up in the morning and I've gotten a couple of emails from homeowners or architects or real estate agents asking me questions about something, and I respond to all of those.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then the next thing I usually do is start updating the website with the information that we've learned from the previous day.
• 18:38
  Scott Woolley: So curious, it makes me think.
• 18:41
  Scott Woolley: So, have you found homes and have you actually ever gone and knocked on a door saying to the homeowner, I just want to talk to you about your house?
• 18:51
  Scott Woolley: Let you know.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Early on, I I did a little bit of that, but um, you know, it's it's not like the days when I grew up, which was in the 70s, where people weren't petrified of somebody knocking on a door like it is today.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: So we don't do that at all.
• 19:08
  Scott Woolley: Okay.
• 19:09
  Scott Woolley: But do you reach out to people when you find a house that's not documented or not in the website?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: We we reach out to people, they reach out to us uh quite frequently because their house will be designed by a well-known architect, but they'll go to our archive and it's missing, and they'll want to send us that information.
• 19:29
  Scott Woolley: Does that does that help with the value of a home?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: But from a sale, it it helps with the marketing of the home.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: Because now you have the facts behind it.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: And would you it would be it would be it would be like, for example, if you had um a black car that used to be a Lincoln Futuro and it shot flames out the back, it would just be an odd car.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: But if you really knew that it was the Badmobile, right, then you'd be a lot more interested in it.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
• 20:05
  TIffany Woolley: Such a good mindset, really.
• 20:08
  TIffany Woolley: Yeah.
• 20:09
  TIffany Woolley: It's so crazy.
• 20:11
  TIffany Woolley: So w what percentage of the homes are still intact?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: I would say somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the houses are still around.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it it's it's good.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we went through an era in the 80s and the 90s where a number of these got torn down.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we don't try to preserve every modernist house.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, some were not built to stay that great, some were not designed particularly well, but uh most of them were really quite exceptional labors of love for the architect, for the original client, uh, for the builders, for the structural engineers who put them together.
• 20:56
  Scott Woolley: So you're saying about how that that so many have been torn down and and and and uh gone.
• 21:03
  Scott Woolley: Do you work and help to keep ones that may be being destroyed or try to what are you how are you involved in that aspect?
• 21:10
  TIffany Woolley: Preservation.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: Preservation.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: So we have a newsletter, it's very successful.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: We have about a hundred thousand people that read it every Monday.
• 21:19
  Scott Woolley: Wow.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: And in each issue, we put out endangered alerts on all the houses that we hear are in trouble around the country, and then galvanizes attention to that house.
• 21:34
  TIffany Woolley: And once this attention is stirred up, what happens next?
• 21:38
  TIffany Woolley: Do we fight to save it, for example?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it depends on on who owns it and and what the fight really is, for instance.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if the house has already changed hands and it's about to be destroyed, there's often nothing we can do at that point.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: But if the house has gone vacant, Because the last owner has gone into assisted living, for instance, and now the heirs are controlling it.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: We can give them a lot of technical advice and resources on ways that they can sell the house without having it be subject to destruction.
• 22:16
  TIffany Woolley: So why a lot of times down here in South Florida, you'll see houses actually broken apart and preserved and repurposed in another space.
• 22:30
  TIffany Woolley: Is this something that you all work with as well?
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: We have given people help on that.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: Primarily, most recently, we've been involved in helping somebody move a house.
• 22:43
  TIffany Woolley: Right.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: So this was this was a case where a George Matsumoto house in Raleigh, North Carolina was purchased, and the couple was going to just tear it down and build a much larger house on the lot because the land was valuable.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Because we promoted that in our newsletter, another couple decided they wanted to buy the house from uh and and move it.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so a few months later, we were up at five in the morning with bucket trucks and a full fleet of police cruisers uh moving that house through the streets to its new location, which it is very successful now.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it's an Airbnb.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: People can stay overnight there.
• 23:30
  TIffany Woolley: What a fun process.
• 23:34
  Scott Woolley: So when a house does get torn down, does that house stay in your records?
• 23:39
  Scott Woolley: Oh, yes.
• 23:40
  Scott Woolley: Forever.
• 23:41
  Scott Woolley: So it's a f okay.
• 23:41
  Scott Woolley: So it's a full history of every house that you have come across and found.
• 23:46
  Scott Woolley: Right.
• 23:46
  Scott Woolley: So how extensive is the the background of each of these homes that you have on the in the database?
• 23:53
  Scott Woolley: Does it have like layouts?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Usually we we we don't put plans on there because plans don't translate very well over the web, and most people don't know how to read plans.
• 24:05
  Scott Woolley: Right.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: So we we have three or four photos.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: We have the year built, we have the original client and the location of the house, uh, the architect, the builder, the engineer.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: If we can find all that information, um, how the house has changed hands over time.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, was there a murder in the driveway in 1972?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh interesting things like that.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 24:28
  TIffany Woolley: See, they really are each house, really is a story in and of itself.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 24:36
  TIffany Woolley: And it was such an interesting time, you know, you know, with technology and you know, creativity, I feel like it really was the beginning of modern life.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this was really uh an explosion because materials like steel and uh large glass was being used in houses for the first time, and the central heating and air meant you could you build bigger rooms.
• 25:05
  TIffany Woolley: And things were just made so much better back then.
• 25:09
  TIffany Woolley: They were built to last.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, custom houses, no matter what their style, yeah, true, are typically built to last because it's a one-off.
• 25:18
  TIffany Woolley: True.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh houses designed by developers for large multiple projects can vary a lot in terms of the construction quality.
• 25:27
  TIffany Woolley: Have you come across any like neighborhoods that have been preserved, like a full mid-century modern, like you said, a developer plot, you know, plot?
• 25:38
  TIffany Woolley: Like I know California was through some of my TV watching and movies, there was some great developers back in this in the 60s and 50s.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, yes.
• 25:52
  TIffany Woolley: Because it would be so cool to see a whole neighborhood.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, in California, there are countless neighborhoods of mid-century moderns, uh, particularly in Los Angeles and in the valley and in Palm Springs, uh, because the climate lent itself to this kind of architecture.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: You didn't have to worry about snow loads, for instance, in the winter.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you had all that sunshine, um, you it was it was the the air was drier, it was easier to do.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: And also, particularly in Palm Springs, a lot of these homes were second houses.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: Vacation were primary residences.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: So people felt a little more free to do something new and innovative than they might do in their own home, you know, back in Kansas.
• 26:43
  TIffany Woolley: So cool.
• 26:44
  TIffany Woolley: And I they are so beautiful.
• 26:47
  Scott Woolley: So you mentioned in the beginning when we first started talking about uh the second house that was in North Carolina that you had seen when you were a kid.
• 26:55
  Scott Woolley: Are there any other houses that are now gone that you're just crushed, you know, crushed that are gone that don't exist?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and that's unfortunately a a pretty long list.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Really.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um the the houses on our website, uh, when we know they've been destroyed, we'll try to find a bulldozer picture of when the bulldozers came and took them out.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because uh people find that very moving and motivating and and it gets them to want to work more in preservation.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um the good news is that uh, particularly since we've been documenting these, the pace of destruction has slowed down remarkably.
• 27:42
  TIffany Woolley: That must be so gratifying.
• 27:44
  TIffany Woolley: Yeah, that must be so gratifying.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's really a win for the the the buyers, the sellers, and for the community to be able to keep that part of its history.
• 27:59
  Scott Woolley: So you've been doing this for quite a number of years.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, 20 years.
• 28:04
  Scott Woolley: 20 years.
• 28:05
  Scott Woolley: So is there a point where you feel as though uh we may not find any?
• 28:09
  Scott Woolley: We've found all the homes that there are.
• 28:11
  Scott Woolley: Is it something that you'll can will continually find that there's so many out there?
• 28:17
  Scott Woolley: Or is it getting less and less here's the interesting thing.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: So we have about 30,000 on the website now, uh-huh.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: But in our magazine library of the six million pages, are probably another four to six thousand that we haven't extracted yet because you'd have to open those magazines and you know, read through them and find the houses and then move that information over to the website.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's a long, laborious process, right?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right until AI came along, okay, tell us and I can teach it to do those extractions for me.
• 28:55
  TIffany Woolley: I love that.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: So we're actually data mining our own site to find more houses.
• 29:00
  TIffany Woolley: That's fascinating.
• 29:02
  TIffany Woolley: And so is AI your team essentially, or do you have a team that works alongside you?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: So we we have a staff of 12 that work, but um, AI is you know an engine like Claude or Chat GPT that you can train to do that work.
• 29:21
  TIffany Woolley: So fascinating.
• 29:22
  TIffany Woolley: And have you been able to spin off into the furniture when you find these treasure troves or appliances?
• 29:28
  TIffany Woolley: I mean, I would think that some people are trying to preserve like a stove in their house that could be, you know, another mid-century modern house might have that piece that they need, or, you know, are are people using you as a source like that at all?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: No, we decided not to get into that sort of level of granularity about it.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: But I point people all the time, you know, Facebook Marketplace, even old school Craigslist, right?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's where you can post things like this and somebody looking for it will jump right on it.
• 30:02
  Scott Woolley: Do you have people reaching out to you that have a, you know, uh I would consider a beautiful home that are considering now remodeling it and changing it.
• 30:12
  Scott Woolley: Do you try to work with them to try to keep?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yes.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they I'm not an architect, so I can't provide them architecture services.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I can give them some general guidelines on how to make the process of renovation a little bit easier on them.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 30:32
  TIffany Woolley: Well, not being a trained architect, but you you literally are like a major resource of knowledge on the subject of modernist.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 30:43
  TIffany Woolley: So how much feedback or how much is your imprint when these houses, you know, come available and people do want to renovate?
• 30:52
  TIffany Woolley: I'm sure they don't want to not be talking to you a lot.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, the uh people are very nice and and they call or they email, and and some want to take my advice and some don't, and and either way is okay.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think that one of the trends across America is that people don't ask the right people for advice.
• 31:17
  TIffany Woolley: So true.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: So when they're thinking about renovating their mid-century house, they go to their cousin Earl, who is a home builder, I know, who's never built a modernist house before in his life to get Earl's opinion.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: And Earl goes through in about 15 minutes and says, Well, you know, if you renovate this, you'll never get your money out.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think you just tear it down.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that happens constantly.
• 31:46
  TIffany Woolley: I know.
• 31:46
  TIffany Woolley: And I feel like down here in South Florida, like you had mentioned in the 80s and the 90s, you know, I can see some of these beautiful, you know, mid-century Florida ranches that people put a, you know, tile roof on and, you know, tried to change a little bit here and there.
• 32:07
  TIffany Woolley: And it's, you know, I just feel like it is part of our job to bring it back to its original glory.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it's really a sliding scale.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, at one end, you're doing a 100% pure renovation.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: You're trying to take it back exactly like it was in 1954, you know, color for color, material for material.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other end of the spectrum, you are bringing back maybe the skeleton of the building, but you're changing everything else inside.
• 32:41
  TIffany Woolley: Right.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's lots of gray area in between.
• 32:44
  TIffany Woolley: Very true.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I just try to encourage homeowners to save as much as they can, as much as is practical, as much as affordable, so that it looks like a wonderful modernist house when they're through.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: You can avoid certain mistakes.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's never a good idea to attach an Italian-aged villa addition to your mid-century modernist house.
• 33:09
  Scott Woolley: It's so true.
• 33:10
  Scott Woolley: Are there many homes being built today in this style?
• 33:14
  TIffany Woolley: I think they're missed.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I'm happy to say that it has had a comeback in about the last 10 or 15 years.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, particularly in the coastal areas, but in in every major city, you have residential architects who are doing exceptional work in this.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in our area, in Raleigh, North Carolina, we just had one of our houses um get honored by Architecture Record as one of their record houses, which is uh, you know, quite a high designation.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: And and this is happening everywhere.
• 33:47
  TIffany Woolley: So tell us about what is happening in Delray in October, you said.
• 33:54
  TIffany Woolley: So what was how did you get to this house and how did they get to you?
• 33:58
  TIffany Woolley: And what was the master plan?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: This is the story behind the house.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: So we did a benefit event in Miami uh earlier this year at the Jetsons house I mentioned earlier, which was designed by Rufus Nims.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a very successful party.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: And two of the guests at that party are the owners of the house in Delray Beach.
• 34:19
  TIffany Woolley: Okay.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: And they were really uh interested in this and wanted to be hosts.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: They took a uh Paul Rudolph house called the Biggs House on Seabreeze Avenue and started doing a renovation.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there were some mistakes that they made in the demolition process, and they got dinged for it, uh, which was appropriate.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the house really became somewhat controversial, and and we document all of that in the party invitation.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: So, this is an opportunity for people to see how the house turned out.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's just gorgeous, and to understand the different opinions that various people have about the renovation.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna have a cocktail party uh on that Friday night, October the 23rd.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we're gonna have live entertainment, it's gonna be very elegant.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then the next day on the 24th, we'll have an opportunity for people to do tours through the house, kind of walkthroughs during the day.
• 35:19
  Scott Woolley: So tell us what are the little dings or the little problems they had.
• 35:24
  Scott Woolley: Were they problems where they were going away from the, you know.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, the the the basic element was that they had applied for um a certain set of permits to renovate the house.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: And as they got deeper and deeper into some of the demolition, they found a lot of damage that was not going to be recoverable.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: So they made the decision to take it down to the steel.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: And they didn't have the paperwork to do that.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it put a quite a sizable delay in their process of having to go back and get another permit and and so forth.
• 36:03
  TIffany Woolley: You know, one thing we deal with in Delray too, obviously, when you're dealing with permits, there is a struggle.
• 36:11
  TIffany Woolley: And especially when you're trying to preserve something in any renovation, you really never know what you're getting into until you're in it.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Until you open up the walls.
• 36:24
  TIffany Woolley: Until you open up the walls.
• 36:26
  TIffany Woolley: So was their intent to make it and preserve it as a you know, a beautiful mid-century monitor.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: So they they found they found a copy of the original plans in the house, and and they want to make it as faithful as possible.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you know, the restrictions are that when you build a house or restore a house, it still has to be up to building, correct?
• 36:52
  TIffany Woolley: Right.
• 36:52
  TIffany Woolley: And Florida has some interesting codes due to the storms and do the storms due to the weather, due to structural things.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I believe that the couple had their hearts in the right place and did the best job that they possibly could to bring this back.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's really a gorgeous thing.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a hundred percent pure renovation, but it's good, and people will enjoy spending an evening at our benefit cocktail party.
• 37:20
  TIffany Woolley: Absolutely.
• 37:21
  Scott Woolley: So when you say they're they're not pure, what do you mean by that?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean that it's not exactly like it was originally.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the the footprint's been expanded.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there is uh the the original house was up on stilts, essentially, right?
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: And and this one has living space on that bottom floor now.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_02: There's an addition to the house off the back that is separate.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not exactly like it was to begin with.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: That would be a pure reality.
• 37:54
  TIffany Woolley: I understand.
• 37:55
  TIffany Woolley: Okay.
• 37:56
  TIffany Woolley: And you know what I'm curious with some of your clients and you know, the people you work with, how is it finding contractors to work with?
• 38:07
  TIffany Woolley: Down here, I feel like a lot of times they get so used to being in and out.
• 38:12
  TIffany Woolley: Nobody wants this, you know, very handholding experience.
• 38:18
  TIffany Woolley: You know, it becomes a really so we end up taking on a lot of the jobs and work with contractors we do, because you know, we want to take that slow process and you know make sure it's done right.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I tell you a little secret.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, what most people do is they hire an architect, they design something, then they put it out for bids.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: And then they often take the low bidder.
• 38:47
  Scott Woolley: This is a horrible strategy.
• 38:49
  Scott Woolley: Say that, say that again because people need to hear that.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: This is absolutely horrible strategy, not because of the low bidder part, although that's not necessarily good, right?
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact that they waited to get a contractor involved until after the design was done.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: The ideal strategy is to ask your architect, who do you like to work with the best?
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: And have that builder come in on some of the initial design meetings because they're gonna know more than the architect what things cost, what things are available, right?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_02: What you can get next day, or what's gonna take six months to arrive from Germany.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_02: So they are the reality check that you want to have when this is on paper versus when it comes time to build it.
• 39:35
  Scott Woolley: Yeah.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: And if people do that, they will save an incredible amount of time and money and hassle.
• 39:42
  Scott Woolley: Where we we believe exactly what you're saying.
• 39:46
  Scott Woolley: Almost every client that comes in, you know, they come to us.
• 39:49
  Scott Woolley: We're happy they're coming to an interior design firm, and they've they're working with us, and then we're telling the client, let's bring in the architect and the and the builder and do this together.
• 40:03
  Scott Woolley: Exactly.
• 40:04
  Scott Woolley: Yeah, but but people don't realize that.
• 40:07
  Scott Woolley: People think, I'm gonna go get an architect, I'm gonna get this all designed, then I'm gonna go find a builder, and now I got the building being my house being built, now I'll go find the interior designer.
• 40:17
  Scott Woolley: And the interior design is then saying to the owner, Well, did you think about this, this, and this, and the flow of your house and how you live in the house?
• 40:24
  Scott Woolley: And no, we didn't think about all that.
• 40:26
  Scott Woolley: I thought the architect did that.
• 40:28
  Scott Woolley: No, the architect's giving you right.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: And particularly now with the prices of goods changing dramatically and shipping concerns and geopolitical interruptions to the flow of building materials.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's even more critical to have the builder involved in those early conversations.
• 40:50
  TIffany Woolley: Are there materials that are just not available anymore?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: No, that I that I wouldn't know because I don't keep track of those.
• 40:58
  TIffany Woolley: Okay.
• 40:58
  TIffany Woolley: So you have hosted more than 450 episodes of US Modernist Radio, and you've interviewed more than 750 people.
• 41:10
  TIffany Woolley: After all those, you know, conversations, what makes someone fascinating to interview?
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think that the first thing is if they'll just relax a little.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, we let people know in advance that our show is for the general public, it's not for the architecture professional.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: We're not asking them to give a lecture to a university audience.
• 41:34
  TIffany Woolley: That makes sense.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_02: We want to talk about them and what's fun in their life and how they came to this field and interesting things about them or the houses they design or live in.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, one of our most um appreciated series is called Children of Genius, where we interview the kids of famous architects.
• 41:55
  TIffany Woolley: That is cool.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_02: So we've interviewed John Lautner's daughter, we've interviewed Frank Lloyd Wright's grandson, we've interviewed Richard Neutra's two sons, um, and we've done probably 20, 25 of those.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_02: And besides talking about architecture, they talk about how it is to grow up in a household with an architect, particularly one who's famous.
• 42:18
  TIffany Woolley: That is such a great story.
• 42:20
  TIffany Woolley: And, you know, one of the reasons we got into the podcast as well is everybody's stories are so interesting.
• 42:27
  TIffany Woolley: And I love that you're giving, you know, attention to this niche because it is a special person to live in one of these homes.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I one of the questions I get all the time is someone will come up to me at a talk, because I talk around the country and they'll say, you know, I love modernism, but my wife doesn't, or my husband doesn't.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: What do I do?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I tell them, no problem, I need you to go online and book a supermodernist Airbnb somewhere and take them away for the weekend, yeah, so they can spend a couple of nights in one and get the vibe.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: And understand why people like these so much.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_02: And that has converted quite a few people.
• 43:13
  TIffany Woolley: So, what do you think some of those reasons are that people end up liking them so much?
• 43:18
  TIffany Woolley: Is it the low maintenance?
• 43:20
  TIffany Woolley: Is it the, you know, the airy, the it kind of had they did have an eco flair back then as well, because they were they were they were the first greenhouse to a large extent.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: I think what people like about modernist houses in terms of living there is that the space is very efficient in a modernist house.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_02: You tend to use every square foot every day.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas if you're in a McMansion, there's some rooms you're never gonna set foot in for weeks, right?
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very good point.
• 43:52
  TIffany Woolley: I like that.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: You're having to heat and cool those places, it's more expensive.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_02: You had to build them in the first place.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's one you know big advantage.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: Secondly, um most modernist houses don't have eight-foot ceilings.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: So they're they're going up, they're doing clear story windows, they're bringing light in from different sources.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they're having courtyards and atriums and sliding glass doors and ways to get the breeze and the fresh air in.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's it's much like people might experience if they go to a typical beach house, right?
• 44:29
  Scott Woolley: Yeah.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: But they're getting that in their own modernist house, and it's just lovely.
• 44:34
  Scott Woolley: Yeah, most modernist houses that that I see or have seen, like in our neighborhood, we have one that every time I drive by it, I always say, that's a really cool looking house.
• 44:43
  TIffany Woolley: It is a cool looking house.
• 44:44
  Scott Woolley: Pretty much m almost all of them.
• 44:46
  Scott Woolley: You you drive by them and you're like, that's a really cool looking house.
• 44:50
  Scott Woolley: But today's houses that are being built, you're not saying that about them.
• 44:54
  Scott Woolley: You're not admiring the way they look or the way the angles and the lower roofs and the glass.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's and I don't I don't know what if you guys have these uh in your area, but we have something here that's spreading like kudzu called the Texas Donut.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_02: Are you familiar with that?
• 45:13
  TIffany Woolley: Oh, do tell.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: So the Texas Donut is a building type that I'm told was developed in Texas by developers, and it's essentially a parking deck that you build apartments or condos around.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: So people park in the middle and live on the outside of the donut.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, it's about five to six stories tall, and they're usually sort of gray, beige, boring colored.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_02: They're easy to put together and inexpensive to build, and they're great for transitional housing.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: So you can't afford the developers because they sell like hotcakes, but they they just don't look that great.
• 45:53
  TIffany Woolley: No, and that's something that we hope with the podcast too, is to you know, bring awareness and enlighten people.
• 45:59
  TIffany Woolley: There's a lot of times, you know, in this modern society, we like, why aren't they building things like this anymore?
• 46:06
  TIffany Woolley: Why don't they take more time?
• 46:07
  TIffany Woolley: Why don't you know we use some of these materials in this more fast pace?
• 46:12
  TIffany Woolley: I hate to say like the cookie-cutter mentality.
• 46:16
  TIffany Woolley: You know, so it is such a joy to, you know, speak with you and you know, know that there's so many people out there wanting to preserve that.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they want to preserve the old ones and they want to build new ones that are affordable and interesting and allow for the kind of lifestyle that we have today.
• 46:38
  Scott Woolley: So if if Frank Lloyd Wright were to walk into your home today, what would be the first question you would ask him, or what would be the first criticism you would give to him?
• 46:51
  Scott Woolley: And I and I mention his name because he's kind of like the iconic figure.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: I can promise you, if Frank Lloyd Wright was alive today, he would be the Kim Kardashian of Argentina.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: He would have Instagram feeds and socials and a crew and a PR firm.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he would be all over the place just like he was during the 50s.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 47:17
  TIffany Woolley: So he really was a personality, you know, as an extension of his design.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 47:24
  TIffany Woolley: And his whole thing was working with nature too.
• 47:28
  TIffany Woolley: He was always about feeling the property.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: And all all the modernists had that as a foundation of their belief system, is to try to fit the house to the best use of the site and the views that were available, the elevation of the terrain, yeah, uh special features.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in Palm Springs, for instance, Albert Frey built a house uh which is up on the mountain above the Palm Springs Art Museum.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: It has a giant boulder in the living room.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_02: And he just built the house around the boulder.
• 48:05
  Scott Woolley: So cool.
• 48:06
  Scott Woolley: You know, it's he has nothing to do with uh building homes, but the person I always think of in this category is Ansel Adams.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the photographer.
• 48:17
  Scott Woolley: Yes, yeah.
• 48:18
  Scott Woolley: For some reason, uh he always comes into my mind when you start talking about modernism and modern homes and I mean, I think because he he photographed a lot of Wright's homes.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: No, Ansel Adams didn't do photography of buildings primarily.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you're thinking maybe of Julius Schulman.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: He was the most famous architecture photographer and shot Wright and Laudner and Neutra and all the very famous ones of the time.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: Ansel Adams was more nature and vistas and mountains and national parks.
• 48:50
  Scott Woolley: Didn't he shoot a few of his helms, Wright's homes?
• 48:54
  Scott Woolley: I I'm not aware of it.
• 48:56
  Scott Woolley: You could be correct.
• 48:58
  Scott Woolley: Interesting.
• 49:00
  TIffany Woolley: So you've obviously seen so many great ones.
• 49:04
  TIffany Woolley: What stands out to you when you're like really walk into one that's special?
• 49:10
  TIffany Woolley: Like, what is it?
• 49:11
  TIffany Woolley: Is it the way it was done architecturally?
• 49:14
  TIffany Woolley: Is it the interior?
• 49:15
  TIffany Woolley: Is it the way it makes you feel?
• 49:17
  TIffany Woolley: Or is it like the highlighting of a boulder or a great tree?
• 49:22
  TIffany Woolley: What are the features that really stick out to you?
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the question that I ask, and it just happens, is how do I feel about being in this house?
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, do I feel more calm?
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: Do I feel more relaxed?
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: Do I feel a sense of beauty in the house?
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: Do I feel that the design decisions into it kind of hang together?
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: Or was the architect too ambitious and trying to do too many things at once?
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_02: True.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we have a competition here in North Carolina called the George Matsumoto Prize, which is for new modernist houses.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: And the jury constantly gives feedback to the houses that are, you know, often quite large, not for their size, but the fact that there are just too many elements that are going on.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so you get a disjointed kind of feeling instead of a cohesive kind of feeling going through the house.
• 50:19
  TIffany Woolley: Yeah, because it really wasn't a maximalist phase, it was kind of a minimalist phase.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_02: And and there are things that you can do, I think, that are really cool to bring that into your life.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: For instance, in my own house, uh, which is a modernist house built in 2010, we intentionally didn't put very many closets inside the house.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: And people would go, oh my God, why would you do that?
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, one is because you make a lot of closets, you fill them with stuff.
• 50:50
  unknown: Yeah.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_02: So we didn't want to, you know, send ourselves down that road.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_02: But secondly, we made an extra half a space in our garage and put in shelving units.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_02: So essentially, we've outsourced all our storage to that half a space in the garage, and we don't have to deal with that, you know, mental load inside the house.
• 51:15
  TIffany Woolley: Yeah, mental clutter.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:18
  TIffany Woolley: I know we talk about that sometimes on the show too.
• 51:21
  TIffany Woolley: Yeah.
• 51:22
  TIffany Woolley: Which, you know, it's funny that mid-century modern is a what is a minimalist, less cluttered time in general.
• 51:29
  TIffany Woolley: So that was a healthier mentality that trans to a certain extent.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, to be fair, a lot of those houses were really quite cluttered.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, um, but you know, the pictures that we see of them are not.
• 51:46
  Scott Woolley: So you have an event coming up in Delray.
• 51:49
  Scott Woolley: Do you have many of these events around the country on a regular basis?
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, we do two or three a year.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, owners of significant modernist houses will uh very generously offer up their space for us to do a fundraising cocktail party or tour.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then all that money goes back into the research and documentation of our nonprofits project.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: So we're gonna have a great time in Del Rey at this house.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, Mike and Nina Marco are the owners.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: They've been wonderful about helping us put the event together, and we're gonna have a great time.
• 52:25
  TIffany Woolley: I know Del Rey has a lot of passionate people to preserve a lot of the you know old beauty, you know, that we all appreciate.
• 52:34
  TIffany Woolley: So I love to hear that, and I look forward to learning more about that.
• 52:39
  TIffany Woolley: Let's play George's Dream House.
• 52:42
  TIffany Woolley: If you could take the architect, the location, the view, the interior, and one iconic feature from five modernist houses and create your ultimate home.
• 52:57
  TIffany Woolley: What would you do?
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god, this is a college admission question here.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_02: That is very complex.
• 53:05
  TIffany Woolley: I'm trying to get the design features because that's where my, you know, I love to pick your brain on that.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_02: So um there is a house in Palm Springs.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was designed by Jim Jennings.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's called Desert One.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's incredibly unusual because it's a one-bedroom, one-bathhouse.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_04: No way.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_02: You just don't see that anymore.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_04: No.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's, I think, like 800 square feet, 900 square feet, but it has this giant enclosed courtyard that has a pool, an outdoor cooking area, and and covered space.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_02: So you're getting another thousand or two thousand square feet of usable outdoor space in this surrounded courtyard.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to own that house.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's so elegant and so fit for being by yourself or for entertaining, you know, 30 or 40 of your closest friends, or dipping in the pool.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_02: You have total privacy on the inside.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's just a dream home for me.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I got to know Jim Jennings, the architect, who is still around, and we have an archive of his work on U.S.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: Modernists.
• 54:21
  Scott Woolley: Aren't there quite a few really unusually wonderful homes in Palm Springs?
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_02: There are hundreds, if not.
• 54:29
  TIffany Woolley: So would you say that is a modernist capsule area?
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, by far, that's the number one concentration of modernist homes in America.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: All built in the 50s, pretty much, right?
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_02: From the 50s and the 60s, a little bit of the 70s in there.
• 54:50
  Scott Woolley: You had a lot of iconic individuals who had those homes.
• 54:54
  TIffany Woolley: I mean, who lived in Bob Hope and Frank Silver's.
• 54:56
  TIffany Woolley: Bob Hope's house was fabulous.
• 54:58
  unknown: Right.
• 54:59
  TIffany Woolley: Sinatra.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then and then Palm Springs, you know, went on a big decline.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, people didn't care about it anymore.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they had teenagers, you know, driving cars fast through the streets.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, it fell out of favor with Los Angeles.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that's when some of the teardowns started.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_02: Fortunately, not a lot in Palm Springs.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then the 90s, uh, there was one particular house that's noted for bringing back this movement, and that was the Kaufman House in Palm Springs, in which a couple bought and did an immaculate restoration.
• 55:35
  Scott Woolley: Wow.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_02: Really a textbook case.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then other people sort of like, well, I could be doing this with my house or near this little neighborhood down the street.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_02: And uh now everybody wishes they had invested back in the 90s.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 55:51
  TIffany Woolley: Yeah, it it's such a special, iconic place.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's great.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone should should go there.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they have a festival called Modernism Week every February, which is like the Super Bowl of Mid-Century Modernism.
• 56:08
  Scott Woolley: Are there other cities that that do the same type of thing?
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, New Canaan, Connecticut has about a hundred mid-century modern houses, great ones.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they have a tour every other October.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they'll be having one in October of 2027.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Sarasota, Florida has an event every November in their area.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in Raleigh, we have something called Mottapalooza twice a year, which is a tour of new modernist houses.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Huh.
• 56:41
  Scott Woolley: Very interesting.
• 56:42
  TIffany Woolley: It's so cool.
• 56:44
  TIffany Woolley: What was the ugliest modernist house you've ever come across?
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_02: The ugliest modernist house.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um let me think.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_02: So almost all modernist houses are professionally designed.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_02: There are a few um non-architects who just happen to be geniuses who were able to design their own and it worked.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_02: But there are some of those um geniuses who didn't quite pull it on.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't want to name any names, but they tried and and they failed.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 57:24
  TIffany Woolley: That's funny.
• 57:25
  TIffany Woolley: I guess that's happens all the time.
• 57:28
  TIffany Woolley: Well, I love this niche that you fell into, and I'm so glad that somebody has taken on this personal mission of documenting such a special time in our history and design history.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_02: We have a great team.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_02: People can go to usmaris.org, see the houses, see the magazine library, and they can click on our tours in advance to get tickets to the Delray Beach event.
• 57:56
  TIffany Woolley: I love that.
• 57:56
  TIffany Woolley: And we will look forward to seeing you there.
• 57:59
  TIffany Woolley: Thank you so much.
• 58:01
  TIffany Woolley: Keep up the good work.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_05: Have a great time.
• 58:03
  TIffany Woolley: Thank you so much for sharing this journey with us on the iDesign Lab podcast.
• 58:09
  TIffany Woolley: It was really a treat.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, my pleasure.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for the invitation.
• 58:13
  Scott Woolley: Have a great day.
• 58:15
  TIffany Woolley: Thank you for listening to the iDesign Lab Podcast.
• 58:19
  Voice Over: iDesign Labs Podcast is an SW group production in association with the five star and TW Interiors.
• 58:26
  Voice Over: To learn more about iDesign Lab or TW Interiors, please visit TWinteriors.com.