With the largest concentration of Mid Century Modern architecture and design in the United States, Palm Springs is a “Mecca” for modern enthusiasts. Frank Sinatra’s Twin Palms estate gets the most attention, homes of stars like Bob Hope, Elizabeth Taylor and Dinah Shore stun tourists with their modern design, too.

What Is Mid Century Modern Architecture & Why Does It Persist? In 1947, a young singer who had just made his first million ($10 million in today’s dollars), walked into the local architect’s office and asked him to build a house in Palm Springs, then a sleepy, sparsely-populated town outside of Los Angeles.

The style that dominated homes from after World War II until the late 1960s is defined by specific characteristics. These characteristics spring from principles taken from Mid Century Modern architecture. Many of the architects of the 1920s and 1930s unleashed their artistic skills not only on a building’s exterior, but brought to home interiors their dedication to open-concept, environmental integration, simplicity, functionality, geometry and nature.

Mid Century Modern designers, like the architects of the period, featured simplicity, comfort, pattern, affordability and new materials in their creations. Design from the 1890s to the 1960s had its roots in, first, the Industrial Revolution and, then, World War II.

Like the Mid Century Modern architects and interior designers, the artists of early and mid-twentieth century departed drastically from the styles that came before—namely, the realistic Academic art that dominated for centuries since the Renaissance. Modern artists abandoned the “narrative” style of rendering subjects realistically to focus on abstractions of subjects instead.