Walker, Mrs. Clinton, House

About this property

Mrs. Clinton Walker House, also known as Cabin on the Rocks, is a beach house located on Carmel Point, near Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1948, it was completed in 1952 for Mrs. Clinton "Della" Walker of Pebble Beach. The home appeared in the 1959 movie, A Summer Place, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1918, Willis J. Walker and his wife purchased 216 acres (87 ha) of land in Carmel-by-the-Sea, a city in Monterey County, California, located on the state's Central Coast. In the 1940s Mrs. Walker's sister deeded an oceanfront lot to Della Walker, with the condition that she find a noted architect to design a house. Della reached out to Frank Lloyd Wright and told him she wanted a house "as durable as the rocks and as transparent as the waves." The home received a National Register of Historic Places designation on November 17, 1977. The house is built on a mass of granite boulders, uses the local Carmel-stone, and has a blue-green roof intended to evoke the color of the sea and the shape of a ship. An example of Wright's organic architecture, it is his only residential work that overlooks the ocean. The 1,200-square-foot (110 m2) single-story home incorporates Usonian design elements. Its concrete floor is divided into hexagonal honeycomb-like 120-degree angles, with three rooms completely open with views of the ocean. Though Wright always intended the house to be roofed in copper (that would turn blue-green through natural process of verdigris), its low roof was originally covered with triangular blue porcelain panels due to copper restrictions during the Korean War of the early 1950s; these were later replaced with copper shingles. The living-dining room is centered around a floor-to-ceiling fireplace with built-in furniture. The window frames are painted in Wright's signature "Cherokee Red", with reverse-stepped glass. In 1954, Wright said, "The over-all-effect is quiet, and the long white surf lines of the sea seem to join the lines of the house to make a natural melody." The grounds were designed by the landscape architect Thomas Church. In 1956, Walker, an artist, asked Wright to design a studio addition to the master bedroom suite. Unbuilt at that time, it was subsequently rendered by her nephew, an architect, in 1960. In the 1959 movie A Summer Place, the characters Ken Jorgenson (Richard Egan) and Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire) own a beach house, which was filmed at the Clinton Walker House. In the film, Sylvia tells Molly (Sandra Dee) that Frank Lloyd Wright designed the home, seemingly located on the East Coast near the movie's "Pine Island, Maine", location. The film shows views of the Walker house's interior, exterior and patio. Additional scenes were filmed at a cottage located at Mission Ranch Hotel and Restaurant in Carmel.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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