M4| Friday, August 23, 2019 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Angeles, went to design
school in Milan and
started an eponymous
clothing company when
she moved back home in- After her company
folded, she stayed home
with Avalon for five
years (she is divorced),
then got her M.B.A. from
the University of South-
ern California. When she
graduated in 2001, she
went into commercial
real estate; in 2005 she
began renovating her
Palm Springs hotel,
which her parents had
bought years earlier.
Avalon studied English
literature and film at the
University of California,
Los Angeles, graduating
in 2016. She used the
money she earned as a
model and actress to buy
OTHER
COSTS
Structural and
foundation work$50,000
Framing$55,000
HVAC$30,000
Glass$8,000
Appliances and
fixtures$40,000
Landscape and
hardscape$42,000
Paint$10,000
Stucco (interior
and exterior)$25,000
Plumbing$29,000
Electrical$30,000
Clockwise from above: A room made from the original garage space,
a kitchen with custom cabinets, a later-addition living room that was
updated, in part, by painting the bricks, and an added pool lounge.their size. The concrete floors had been
covered with Spanish tiles, one room had
mirrors on the ceiling, and the exterior
was coated in thick, pink stucco.
The Rossis bought every book they
could find on Frey and studied his work.
Then Marina called Mr. Rosa, who included
a photo of the original Guthrie House in
his book, to ask his advice. Should she get
rid of all the additions or was it OK to
keep some of the extra space? Mr. Rosa
said Frey told him in his interviews that he
expected his houses to evolve.
“Houses live on,” Frey told
him. Ms. Rossi was relieved.
Still, the project took three
sets of architectural plans.
The first, drawn by a San Di-
ego architect, was too generic
and contemporary, with an open kitchen
and awnings. “It didn’t sit well with us,”
says Avalon.
Next, they hired an Italian architect who
gave the project a sleek and dramatic ethos,
Continued from page M1
A Forgotten Gem
Rises in Desert
specifying steel beams for the frame. Fed up,
and wanting to go back to what they saw as
Frey’s mission of using interesting materials
in a cost-effective and unique
way, the mother and daughter
redesigned the plans them-
selves, using a structural engi-
neer when necessary.
When general contractors
gave them bids over $1 million
to do the work, the Rossis took on that
role, too, with Avalon spending 12-hour
days on site. Using their books on Frey as a
guide during construction, they hired sub-
contractors to strip the floors, giving themPOOL UPGRADE$60,000
Pool lounge additon: $35,000Palm Springs City Hall, 1951Floors: $25,000Custom cabinets: $65,000a new layer of gray concrete
with a glossy finish of epoxy.
The pink stucco exterior was
jackhammered off and re-
placed with a smoother
stucco closer to the original
off-white color. A concrete
fireplace that had been cov-
ered with fake stone and
then a wooden mantel went
back to its original state.
They painted all the interior
walls and ceilings a soft
white and made doors out of
rusted corrugated metal, a
tribute to Frey’s later style.
“They are taking the
house back,” says Caley
Rhodes Sr., owner of Palm
Springs Mirror & Glass, who
worked with Frey on his
houses and helped the Ros-
sis with their windows.
The converted garage that
had been a bar is now a sec-
ond living room. The bed-
rooms have glass doors. In-
stead of tearing down a
brick wall that separated the
kitchen from a dining room
added in the 1940s, Avalon
painted each brick white, a
nod to a photo they found of
a painted brick wall in an
apartment in Paris owned by
Le Corbusier, whom Frey
worked for.
Outside, they redid the
swimming pool and added a
small lounge area, then land-
scaped the 1/3-acre lot using
slate pavers and boulders.
Marina grew up in LosAlbert Frey is widely recognized as a pioneer
of Desert Modernism, a style that refers to
Midcentury Modern homes in California’s
Coachella Valley and includes architects such
as Richard Neutra and John Lautner. Born in
Switzerland, Frey trained under Charles-Éd-
ouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbus-
ier, and then moved to New York. He first
came to Palm Springs in 1934, when his
business partner’s brother hired him to de-
sign the Kocker-Samson office building there.
“He fell in love with Palm Springs,” says Jo-
seph Rosa, director of the Frye Art Museum
in Seattle, who extensively interviewed Frey
for his book “Albert Frey, Architect.” Freya house in Silver Lake, which
she fixed up and sold.
The mother-daughter
team had formalized their
working relationship in
2017 when Avalon joined
Avi Ross Group, which Ma-
rina founded to develop,
renovate and design proper-
ties. Coming up are two
new boutique hotels: one in
Malibu, Calif., and one on
the North Shore of Oahu,
Hawaii.
Now that the project is
finished, Avalon has moved
out of the Palm Springs
condo they shared during
construction and back to
Los Angeles. Marina is living
in the new house, though
that is hard to tell. The inte-
rior is starkly minimal, aver-
aging one piece of furniture
per room. Her mantra is
“What Would Albert Do.”PATRICK STRATTNER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (4); SAM MIRCOVICH/REUTERS (CITY HALL); JAMES SCHEPF/PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM (FREY HOUSE II)went on to design more than 200 buildings
in the area, including thePalm Springs City
Halland the Aerial Tramway Valley Station.
His most celebrated work was his own resi-
dence, calledFrey House ll,completed in- Now owned by the Palm Springs Art
Museum, it is a simple, steel-frame house
with expanses of windows, perched on the
side of San Jacinto Mountains. Frey pro-
gressed from simple plaster adobe-style
houses like the Guthrie House to more futur-
istic corrugated-metal and aluminum struc-
tures. He died in 1998 in Palm Springs at the
age of 95.
—Nancy Keates
THE FREY FACTOR IN PALM SPRINGS, CALIF.
Frey House II, 1964New England
Properties
Source:WSJ.Insights2019LuxuryRealEstateStudy;
Base:Plantopurchasehomeinnextthreeyears.
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