and the Goldwater House

PAUL YAEGER

AND THE GOLDWATER HOUSE

BY WALT LOCKLEY

Firstly, it’s Y-A-E-grrr, not Y-E-A-grrr, as it was misspelled by Architectural Digest in 1959 and by many others since. Grrr.

Secondly, contrary to published rumor, Paul Yaeger’s name does not appear on the lists of Taliesin apprentices and other associates. You can see strong Wrightian associations in his work, sure. Friends called him a disciple.

Yaeger was born back east in 1923. His father, Harry C. Yaeger, worked for Underwood and held many patents for powered typewriters from the late 1930s into the 50s. This, fair to say, was a technically-minded family. (Paul later developed a preference for the Ford Fairlane Skyliner retractable hardtops produced between 1957 and 1959, high-end stereophonic equipment of the day, and radiant heat coils installed in the ceiling.) Paul came up through the Loomis School in Connecticut, one of the better prep schools, then Trinity College in Hartford class of ‘45, then to Princeton ‘47, then married in West Hartford Connecticut in 1952.

Yaeger arrived in the valley with no need to enter the educational rigors at Taliesin West. His first credits here pop up in 1955.

Paul Yaeger’s whole architectural career is represented by a single building for a single client, a fascinating house for an extraordinary client. That glaring spotlight tended to throw the rest of his work in shadow, then and now.

The client was Senator Barry Goldwater. The house was called Be-nun-i-kin.

It’s still there on its own private hilltop, after a major remodeling in 2005, and still a private residence. A little south of the Unitarian Universalist Church on Lincoln. Visible from the John Waddell bronze group in the back garden – but let me discourage any urge to visit. It’s hard to stroll past and casually glance through the windows anyway. It doesn’t work like that. The Goldwater House had a moment in the sun lasting several years. Not all the attention was welcome. When the house appeared in Arizona Days and Ways of January 4, 1959, its client already had a distinctive national profile as a U.S. Senator from Arizona, and of course locally for a long time as the sporting idiosyncratic elder son of a well-regarded business and family. Barry Goldwater represented true Arizona backbone, from stock of roadbuilding original settlers who also happened to be Russian-Polish Jews, merchants in Phoenix from 1872. He was a Senator from Arizona. He had charisma.

The Architect posed with his impressive LP collection

The unique retractible-roof Ford Skyliner held fascination for Yaeger who drove his for decades

The Goldwater House as it appears today

It didn’t hurt that new Goldwaters department stores continued to pop up, Park Central in 1956, Scottsdale Fashion Square in 1961, that name in larger letters all the time.

So local coverage of 1959 described a house customized to the needs of the family, forward-looking for sure but rooted in the authenticity of Arizona crafts and materials. For example its Triassic red sandstone walls and chimney had been quarried from an outcropping up north on the Navajo Reservation that Senator Goldwater had spotted from his private plane, then arranged to harvest. Whatever else it was, Be-nun-i-kin was a serious essay in desert masonry. The overall shape was an arrow, pointing to Camelback. All the furniture was either built-in or customdesigned by the architect, who had been “given free rein on the design, subject only to fulfillment of the space requirements of the family… All the angles are functions of a 60-degree equilateral triangle.” Lloyd Kiva contributed hand-screened draperies, and John Bonnell of the White Hogan carved the front door and some interior wooden fixtures, among many many other features and integrated craftwork.

On October 24, 1963 the house and its owner appeared in the national Saturday Evening Post, in a piece by the Washington columnist Stewart Alsop.

The Bayless House in North Central Phoenix commands the hilltop

Photos by Jill Richards Photography

Pennsylvania blue stone floors were often a Yaeger signature

It had somehow become necessary for Barry Goldwater to run for president, although nobody wanted him to, including him.

As part of the cruel “let’s meet the candidates” invasionof-privacy routine, and with a subtext of east coast establishment putting frisky westerners in their place, Stewart Alsop flew out and wrote up his encounter with Goldwater. The second sentence of the long profile ends with the word “half-Jewish”, which the Senator certainly was. Alsop described a completely different Be-nun-ikin, concentrating on its nutty features “which are always getting out of order,”, the oddity of its hexagonal floor plan, the electronic control panel in the bed headboard, the mic’d up amplified waterfall, and an American flag which you could normally hear automatically furling itself at sunset on a metal armature, except it hadn’t worked for weeks.

All this was support for Alsop’s proposition that Barry Goldwater was an adult child from camel country. “His house might have been built by a dexterous 12-year-old boy suffering from an overdose of Popular Mechanics.”

This national press went on for about five years as Goldwater reached, then lost, the 1964 election. That science-fiction house of theirs became a local legend.

One clear plus for Yaeger: some of that national publicity included an illustration of that floorplan, which was reprinted from Tampa to Spokane, looking all triangular and exotic and smart. It caught the eye. It still does.

All this attention, and all these write-ups, miss the single strangest thing about the project, which is how intensely customized the Goldwater house is. How it was shaped around the needs and desires of this particular family, or the head of this family anyway. This meant datagathering and “programming” in the old sense, an unusual amount of research and detailed decisions to make. The architect and the family spent a year together. Apart from the resulting gizmos and the personalities and

The Cooper/ Fratt Residence on Camelback Mountain is one of Yeager’s signature homes. This home retains it’s original cast-concrete “Bermuda” roof, another Yaeger detail

whatever else, that part of the story shows a commitment to tailoring the Goldwater house to an exact tight fit.

And, also, it’s tailored to its hilltop site. Putting a house on the crest of a hill comes with some vertical siting decisions, which can be done with sensitivity or not. Yaeger chose to introduce height variations in the main interior level (slightly higher bedrooms), had the carport and pool tucked away a half-story half-underneath, then surrounded the envelope with limited flat decking and rough fieldstone cactus planters outside. Then the desert dropped away. There was no yard, no flat spaces outside the windows. Just air.

Does that explain the unusual “60-degree equilateral triangle” approach to the floorplan? Did triangles allow a better fit of the house to its hill? It seems sensible that a more faceted exterior could fit the natural formation of its hilltop more closely, and you could frame views with more flexibility and variety, right? No. Nope. Yaeger offered a completely different reason. Quoted in Suburbia Today of April 1960, when asked about why all the triangles our architect answered, “Senator Goldwater is a man avidly interested in the history of Arizona’s land and peoples, a robust and uninhibited personality, and to me he did not seem to belong in anything as slick or rigid as a rectangular space division.”

Honestly that wasn’t the reasoning I expected. If Mr. Yaeger meant to evoke Senator Goldwater caroming off his own honeycomb walls at top speed, good job.

Where did the idea come from?

The hexagonal plan has its own history, nationally and in the valley. Wright and Taleisin pioneered it with the Hanna House in Stanford from 1937, aka the Honeycomb House, also on a hilltop. The Goldwater house is a looser jazzy composition of triangles in comparison. The Hanna

The Strom Residence on Mummy Mountain in Paradise Valley was Yeagers last built residential work

House had to be much more strict because the walls were demountable, meant to be rearranged every few years, and so had to be identical and interchangeable everywhere. Part house, part kit. (The Hannas were a married couple of educators and behaviorists, who brought along their own ideas about environmental psychology, 100% willing to experiment on themselves and their kids.) (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

A honeycomb unit is a reasonable step away from the restrictions of 90-degree angles, while remaining sort of buildable. There are claims that space is wasted in foursquare corners. As you turn a 60-degree corner that’s not quite a corner, that can be disorienting. Perhaps a feature. Maybe a bug.

Up in Pinnacle Peak the Chicagoan artist Walter Bohl had designed himself a hexagonal studio, with the help of a Taliesin apprentice named Bill Owen, in 1953. Bohl said the contractor estimates had blown his mind so he took to building it himself. It took him six winters.

But after the notorious Be-nun-i-kin showed up in the newspapers there was a wave of similar geometric experiments with the floorplan within the next few years, popping up in the desert, designed by Blaine Drake, H.H. Benedict, Charles Montooth, and others. Paul Yaeger used the same general approach for other houses in 1960, 1970, several casas above the Gardiner Tennis Ranch in the early 1970s, and 1981, although there are structural facets and unusual angles in almost all of his work. A designer who takes that level of care will not have a long list of credits. That’s the architect you want, though.

Of about 70 known projects, about 60 are in the Valley, concentrated in eastern Phoenix and Paradise Valley, with the others in California and other western states. Of the 70 about seven are commercial projects. The rest are custom houses, usually hidden from public view.

Those seven commercial projects are modest. There are a couple of medical offices, one at 7301 E. Thomas in Scottsdale with those thin exaggerated arches obligatory for the Los Arcos side of town in 1970. Yaeger also designed the concept market-restaurant Butler’s Pantry on N. 16th Street in 1969, which became Ajo Al’s, and which remains a legitimate architectural experience for a field trip this evening, I’d say, with the rhythm and buzz of good restaurant surroundings, an effect enhanced by those hot enchiladas with that jalapeno white sauce, dang.

And, maybe the best of the batch, although it’s regrettably long gone, was the 1965 Paradise Ford dealership at Camelback and Scottsdale. Paradise Ford grew so fast in 1965 it required two or three architectural updates to deal with the crowding on the street. Yaeger’s version came in November, a glassy pavilion – a lantern, really – with a complicated faceted roof and a really nice vibe.

One of Yaeger’s first houses in Phoenix was 48 North Country Club Drive, originally for Charlie A. Morgan, later associated with the Nace family, built in 1955.

An auspicious early commission for an out-of-towner. The design was a low-slung ranch house, made from concrete block and wood trim, with a self-confident chunky rectilinear design. Interestingly there was a steel frame in it, according to Arizona Builder and Contractor of September 1957, to get the desired deep shadowing overhangs and free-span space in the huge living room. It was billed as the first “atom-proof” residence in Phoenix.

Another prominent Yaeger house is at the highest built elevation on Camelback, we think, on its northeastern flanks. It was designed in 1969 for Curtis Calvin Cooper, then was better known as the home of the abstract expressionist painter Dorothy Fratt. Should we call it the Fratt House?

Just this once. The Fratt House is one of a set of Yaeger houses set into hills with playfully vertical features and spaces inside, decisions arising from their specific rocky windswept surroundings. The Fratt House is built around a central sort of fieldstone tower / chimney mass, which organizes an interior with shallow balconies overhead from the entry point, creating a sense of upward retreat, a sense of nautical trimness, a sense of ski-chalet-in-thedesert, and the kind of thing that’s difficult to photograph. Yaeger embraced and mastered these human-scale 3-D complications. He was really good at that.

There’s a commonality in all these designs, a throughline. It doesn’t have much to do with curb appeal. It has something to do with the materials, what I think of as good rugged National Park materials.

More than that, it has to do with Yaeger’s interest in good fit. His design approach is most like masterful tailoring, bringing that sense of rightness and elegance and balance that comes when your clothes fit (people have told me). His use of faceted geometry comes, not for its own sake, but for a better fit, to avoid wasted space, leftover corners, muda. He used fine materials sparingly and with respect. Same with his treatment of the site. This view of Paul Yaeger is completely consistent with the Paul Yaeger who turned up in the Republic in June 1971, taking part in the conversation about defending the fragile slopes of Camelback from brainless construction. He’d shown slides to the Phoenix Press Club demonstrating flat-land houses, suitable enough for the orange groves below, that developers had shoved onto leveled cuts in the slopes. The absurdity of the house mass and its footing was one thing. Yaeger knew one mountainside property with a site blasted by dynamite and graded flat for $30,000 (in 1971 dollars; $200,000 today) which cost the owner another $35,000 to pay off the downhill neighbor for the piles of scree he’d dropped from above, ultimately all for the privilege of living on a tailings dam.

He offered an alternative. “I have never used more than $1,000 for grading,” he said. “You have to go out and look at the features of the lot and get the feel of it. You have to analyze the contours and figure out how to get machinery into it. You may even have to use hand tools.”

The Paradise Valley Hilltop Roeder Residence as updated by Joel Contreras Design