Palm Desert, California, USA
Stayner Architects restored and preserved the historic Miles C. Bates House guided by the idea that historic preservation is not about turning back the clock, but rather about producing a temporal condition in which a contemporary visitor can exist across multiple time periods.
The restoration effort was awarded a 2021 American Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The “Wave House,” known for its striking roofline, was designed by Walter S. White (1917-2002), a Southern California-born architect and inventor who worked for Rudolph Schindler, Albert Frey, and Douglas Aircraft.
The Miles C. Bates “Wave” House was designed in 1954, completed in 1955, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.
This one-bedroom “studio” was constructed on a former citrus grove at 73697 Santa Rosa Way in what would become the City of Palm Desert and would be the only realized example of White and Bates’ collaboration.
The architects purchased the house from the city of Palm Desert in order to save the unique mid-century structure from destruction and to repurpose it to a new event and hospitality business.
Through a meticulous, two-year-long effort, the firm restored the innovative, patented roof system and emblematic mid-century structure and reactivated the property as a publicly-accessible amenity.
Using sketches and drawings from the Walter S. White archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the architects carefully researched the project’s key design elements, including White’s inventive construction methods and innovative passive design strategies.
A significant portion of the restoration work involved carefully removing elements that were added after the house was constructed
During this process, the architects were thrilled to find several key features:
The original ash wood paneling and joinery, for example, were mummified underneath faux finishes added after Bates’ death.
They were able to carefully restore many other crucial components such as the terrazzo floor, wooden roof, and masonry walls to precisely match their original condition in the 1950s.
Where original elements were beyond repair or completely missing, they were custom fabricated based on Walter White’s original details.
This was the case with numerous original sliding steel doors that had been removed by previous owners or infilled with concrete blocks.
The architects used as light a touch as possible with respect to contemporary updates, carefully increasing the house’s energy efficiency by inserting a new HVAC system into White’s innovative underground ductwork, substituting new, higher-performing glazing wherever possible into original or custom-fabricated steel openings, and designing a new wrap-around, automated curtain system with Tibor, Ltd., and Maharam fabrics in the living spaces for solar heat control.
To maintain the visual thinness of White’s patented 2×4 roof construction, while immensely increasing its thermal insulation, the architects” installed a high performing polyurethane roof, tapering the new material from 5-inches at its thickest to a just few millimeters at the roof’s edge.
Outside of the house, the architects collaborated with the LA-based Cactus Store to create a publicly-accessible botanical garden at the front of the property.
The resulting landscape is primarily composed of plants that were grown locally by the non-profit Mojave Desert Land Trust in their native plant restoration nursery.
The plantings evoke the textures, smells, and colors of the native desert that Miles Bates would have originally encountered on the site.
Project: The Miles C. Bates House
Architects: Stayner Architects
Original Architects: Walter S. White (1955)
Client: Stayner Architects
Contractor: O’Donnell Bros Construction
Photographers: Tim Hirschmann
