If you were to sit down and make a dream checklist of things homebuyers want to see in 2023, it would probably go something like this: an open-concept floor plan, floor-to-ceiling windows, indoor-outdoor living, and an unobtrusive, clean-line structure that draws one’s eyes toward the home’s natural surroundings.

While many of these concepts have morphed into contemporary tropes — due, at least in part, to the proliferation of white-teethed HGTV house-flipper couples — the origin of the movement well predates the barn door slider, the farmhouse sink and the double-vanity industrial complex. 

And his name is William Krisel.  

In the early 1950s, Krisel was just starting out as an architect after graduating from USC in 1949. The young draftsperson managed to score jobs right away in the studios of two powerhouse modernists: Hungarian-born architect and interior designer Paul László and Austrian-born Victor Gruen, a pioneer in commercial designs like shopping malls. Both had immigrated to the U.S. as Nazism spread throughout Europe in the 1930s and ended up in Southern California.

Krisel, who died in 2017 at the age of 92, recalled he soon realized that his name wouldn’t bring the same recognition as his mentors, nor would he be able to command the same cache as the notable modernist architects who commanded custom home commissions from the well-heeled like Rudolph Schindler or Richard Neutra.

“I was just starting out,” Krisel told the LA Times in 2008. “They were already well-established. Why hire me when you could get one of them?”

So, Krisel figured out a workaround. A friendship with Bob Alexander, son of Southern California-based builder George Alexander, led the two to pitch an idea: to build tracts of customizable homes for members of the burgeoning postwar middle class who were newly flush with jobs and cash and desired to live in a home that showed off their ambition and lifestyle.

“I knew homes by the big-name modernists were priced way beyond middle-class reach,” Krisel told the Times. “I also knew no one was offering affordable modernism for that market.”

The elder Alexander reluctantly gave his son and his architect friend 10 lots in the San Fernando Valley to build out this pitch, thinking they’d flop and that would be the end of that.

Not only did the homes sell fast, but Alexander’s margins were far greater than his other tract homes of the time.

“Their main interest was to make money,” Krisel told the Times of working with the Alexanders in 2016. “And my interest was to do good design. In order for them to do my work, I had to come up with a design that was less expensive than the dingbats they were building.”

Come up with designs he did. Based on the success of the San Fernando Valley test development, George Alexander went all in on Palm Springs, letting Krisel and his son have a crack at a tract of land he’d purchased southeast of downtown — a place far removed from the star-studded, custom home-filled neighborhoods of the Movie Colony and Old Las Palmas.

The Twin Palms tract and the Ocotillo Lodge hotel were built at the same time near the same footprint in the late 1950s. The hotel acted “basically as a selling tool to lure buyers and sell the Twin Palms neighborhood,” Bob Bogard, a spokesperson for Palm Springs Modernism Week, told SFGATE.

“Twin Palms was the first midcentury modern purpose-built tract,” said Bogard, who this week was busy preparing for Modernism Week’s fall show. The weekend of parties, tours and seminars includes the popular walking tour of Twin Palms.

What we see in Krisel’s work is an architect working alongside a developer to make a high-end aesthetic work for the masses, Bogard said. Behind that was the machinery of taking economic incentives of a builder, using prefab materials and simple designs that could, with only small tweaks and adjustments of angles, look like custom units — and meshing all of that with a consumer’s desire to have a dwelling that’s unique to them, he continued.

But it wasn’t always adulation for Krisel’s designs of affordable homes, which are now part of his archive at the Getty. They were originally called “degrading” by the American Institute of Architects, of which he was a member. Krisel noted some of his contemporaries considered his designs “not really architecture:”

He disagreed: “I never felt inadequate about my work,” he told the Times. “My architecture was trying to improve how people live and enjoy the benefits of their surroundings.”  

And that’s exactly how Bogard feels explaining that Krisel is one of the first names that now come up when midcentury modern architecture enters the conversation here.  

“We identify with the type of architect; as a result, there’s a lot more pride in ownership and pride in neighborhoods,” he said.

But that type of knowledge and fandom wasn’t always present here either. Palm Springs’ midcentury halcyon days didn’t last long, and by the late 1990s, when Chris Menrad bought his Twin Palms home, Krisel was all but forgotten and the neighborhood was beginning to fall into disrepair.

“I didn’t know who it was or what it was. No one really did,” Menrad told SFGATE. “A friend of mine bought a magazine called Flaunt, and there were all these Julius Shulman photos of my neighborhood. I started to figure it out and was early on a part of the Palm Springs Modern Committee. But nobody really cared. I mean nobody, especially city hall, cared about midcentury Palm Springs. They just wanted new. They wanted to turn it into Palm Desert.”

Menrad, 62, said he decided to restore his home to its original condition and reached out to Krisel himself, who was retired and living in Los Angeles. It wasn’t an instant connection because, Menrad said, various people who were also interested in restoring their homes would contact Krisel over the years, and he’d give them plans and designs and advice — and then they wouldn’t follow it.

“They’d call him and say, ‘We’re done,’ and he’d see it, and they did nothing he suggested,” Menrad said.  

During Menrad’s home restoration project in 2006, Krisel came out and saw the work Menrad was doing, and he approved of what was happening. “He started to connect with me, giving drawings and planning and advice,” Menrad explained. “After that, he did the front yard landscaping and it got published in Metropolis magazine.

“All of a sudden, that one magazine article — that elevated him. That was the genesis of it.”

The article, combined with the phenomenon of AMC’s prestige drama “Mad Men,” started to turn the design world’s gaze toward places like Twin Palms, as well as the architect behind it, Menrad said. “He had been completely forgotten,” he continued. “He was a little bit of a grouchy man. But early on, after the Metropolis article, his wife told me, ‘You’ve given me my husband back.’ He thought people should know him and remember him.”

Bogard’s own home is one of the more notable, at least from an OMG-your-house-is-famous point of view, Krisel examples. “Yes, I happen to live in a Krisel home,” he said. “Ours is in Canyon View Estates from ‘Don’t Worry Darling.’ Our home was adjacent to Harry Styles’ home in the film.”

While having the exterior of his home in a psychological thriller about the perils of living in a company town is a fun thing to talk about at parties, Bogard insists that today the knowledge of and loyalty to the architects here go far beyond factoids: “I moved from Palm Springs from SF 20 years ago,” he explained, “and I’d never lived in an environment where the architects are as commonly known as the street names.  

“People can spot-check you all the time. We are a community where we treasure and revere the architects and the homes.”

Bogard also notes that the pricing of these formerly “affordable” tract homes has skyrocketed with their acclaim and Krisel’s ascendant place in modernism’s history.  

“I’ve seen the price of things continue to go up,” he said. “I’ve only owned my home a year in August. It’s gone up in value about $500,000-$600,000. Nothing has changed. It’s just the demand is there. Will it last? Nobody knows.”

While a home in the Twin Palms tract can now fetch well into the seven figures, Bogard acknowledges there have been fluctuations in the Palm Springs market in the recent past, namely the financial crisis of 2008-09.  

One major difference between that era and now is the demographics in Palm Springs have shifted, Bogard said. “In 2008, I found we were really affected by the downtown because we were vacations and second homes,” he noted. “Now, people are buying here. This is their primary residence.”

The story of the midcentury revival here has gone from “nobody understood it” to “ridiculous money,” Menrad admitted.

“In a weird way, we’re victims of our own success, ” he concluded. “But that’s the big change. Nobody knew anything. Now, every real estate agent is a midcentury expert.”

There’s no doubt about modernist architecture’s influence on this century. But the question remains: Is the Krisel-designed and Alexander-built neighborhood of Twin Palms the actual source of what we see in contemporary development today?  

In 2016, the LA Times estimated that Krisel “designed about 40,000 living units, including larger custom homes, in Palm Springs and elsewhere, but it is the roughly 1,200 modest homes he designed between 1957 and 1963 for builder-developers George and Robert Alexander that defines his ‘language’ of Modernism.”

Krisel’s work in scale and scope is widely accepted as a leap forward in tract housing. The designs were attractive to consumers on a budget but also fit a developer’s bottom line: a working model that helped define California.

While his legacy is not left to question, what, if any, of Krisel’s influence can be seen in current developments?

Andy Shanken, a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, told SFGATE that, in general terms, the model that Krisel and his contemporaries built continues to be emulated by architects and developers, especially when it comes to financial considerations.

“A lot of houses built into subdivisions fit into perceptions of what will sell, and that’s driving this rather than sensitive consideration of climate, conditions and economics of a particular place,” Shanken noted. “It’s about market values instead of what is sensitive to design and urbanism.” 

Modernism Week’s Bogard furthers the argument with the notion that nobody since Krisel has done it better — that the architect and his work will continue to be emulated but never replicated.

And that’s what makes the homes, and the person behind them, remarkable.

“I think Palm Springs was the right place at the right time,” he concluded. “We had factories and technology and pleasant weather and [former] GIs looking to settle in this place where you could live indoors and outdoors. You can’t duplicate what was built then.”