Architecture Style: The Butterfly-Roof House

William Krisel came onto the Mid Century Modern scene as an architect fairly late in the game. Name-brand architects like Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra were garnering a lot of the attention in the 50's, when Bill Krisel came to Palm Springs as a recent USC grad.

Krisel retired as a practicing architect 20 years ago. He was "just a bit surprised" to be asked again recently to create plans for the little butterfly-roofed, post-and-beam structure that became a kind of signature Palm Springs residential architecture style half a century ago.

Working for a 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 original Krisel homes still exist today.

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 helped to break the mold for affordable housing not only in Palm Springs, but also in the west San Fernando Valley in the 1950s.

Over the years, his legacy is the butterfly roof, an engaging and revolutionary architecture style for the time, where the roofline is inverted to be lower in the middle, rather than higher. From an exterior standpoint, this look was very different from what had been the norm up until then: either flat toppers, or the more traditional peaked-middle roof. For newer times, the design lends itself well to water collection and conservation, as the water from the entire roof can be collected via one spout, and then used for irrigation, or other gray-water recycling as that becomes more popular and affordable. From an interior standpoint, the roofline lends itself to more dramatic interior spaces in the center of the house, and more possibilities for light at the outer edges of the floor plan, where bedrooms were typically located.

The construction technique for this type of roof lends itself well to hollowed out, open floor spaces in the public areas of the home. That concept was revolutionary at the time, and it's still a very sought after architecture style now. Designing for southern California, Krisel was able to blend outdoor and indoor spaces, letting the open floor plan of the public spaces flow out to patios and pools.

With updated construction materials and techniques, the butterfly roof is a practical and easy way to differentiate a modern home design. And even here in the Mountain West, homebuyers name the blending of outdoor and indoor spaces as being very important in their decision to buy a home.

As a design concept, Krisel was only given a few lots to build his homes on, as a test. Obviously, his designs were readily accepted, and he went on to be an iconic figure in modern architecture style, though not with the name cachet of the Schindlers and the Neutras.

Bill Krisel brought modernism to the masses. Before him, only the wealthy could build modern homes, commissioning well-known architects and the costly materials they used. Krisel packed excellent architecture into houses of modest size, made of modest materials, and he did it on a very thin dime.

Not only were his test houses accepted, but they also sold faster, and made more profit for the construction company for whom he worked. They sold for $20,000 then, and today, you can buy one of the originals in Palm Springs for about $900,000 on a 100 x 100 suburban lot. Or you can buy plans and have one built, with 21st century amenities.

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