This Palm Springs pad is great to Bond over
Waiting for the much-delayed 007 film? Take a look at this house fit for a real-life Bond, as featured in our Atlas of Interior Design
Phaidon’s Atlas of Interior Design gives readers an unparalleled global tour of more than 400 beautiful, innovative and exquisitely conceived residential interiors from the past eight decades. There are sleepy seaside places and bold, statement, city apartments; easy family houses, and meticulously curated dream homes. The book is the perfect choice for all design lovers, and would-be travellers, and is particularly enjoyable at a time when taking a holiday abroad to see new places can present problems.
Many of us can’t wait to see the forthcoming James Bond film, No Time To Die, which, thanks to the pandemic, has had its release date postponed until October 2021. Many more of us would love to live the carefree, stylish, international life as portrayed by 007 on the silver screen. Still, perhaps we can draw some solace from Villa Grigio, a ravishing Palm Springs pad, fit for Bond, as featured in our new Atlas of Interior Design.
“Television set designer–turned-architect James H. McNaughton designed a sequence of houses in and around Palm Springs after settling there in the late Fifties,” explains the book. “One of his most enticing projects was undoubtedly Villa Grigio (1963). The villa characteristically fused ‘desert Modernism’ with Italianate neoclassicism—expressed by the arched colonnades that threaded through the house and flowed out onto the pool terrace.
“Built for the business couple the Kramers, who lived there until 1971, one of the villa’s most glamorous later occupants was rumoured to be the James Bond actor Roger Moore. In 2014, interior designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard, who has lived in Los Angeles since the early Nineties, knew he had to have the property as his weekend retreat. Bullard embarked on a restoration that maximized the house’s dramatic architecture. The spacious living room features a predominantly white color palette punctuated with bursts of hot-fuchsia pink, as seen in the Kravet upholstery for the semi-circular sunken sofa that looks out over the secret courtyard garden. Other standout pieces include a pair of curvaceous Vladimir Kagan sofas arranged around an Angelo Mangiarotti cocktail table, referencing the engaging mid-century heritage of the house.” It’s a table, and indeed a house, just right for dry martinis, shaken not stirred.
To see many more such places, order a copy of our Atlas of Interior Design here.