The Morelli House and the Development of Modern Architecture

Through a partnership with the Junior League of Las Vegas, the Online Nevada Encyclopedia is pleased to present an exhibit showcasing the life and home of Antonio R. Morelli. This exhibit focuses on the development of Mid-Century Modern architecture in the West and its impact on the design of homes in Las Vegas, including the Morelli House.

The gallery draws on images from the Morelli Collection (soon to be housed at UNLV Special Collections), the Richard Hooker Collection, and from photographers Allan Sandquist and Alan Hess.

In addition, Alan Hess, champion of Mid-Century Modern architecture, preservationist, writer, and architect, composed the text that accompanies the images. Hess has written over fifteen books in his series on the subject of Mid-Century Modern architecture and has been instrumental in qualifying a number of structures for the National Register of Historic Places.

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Courtesy of Richard Hooker Historical Collection.

Almost four years after Antonio Morelli began work at the Sands, he felt secure enough to set down roots and build a home in 1958. Helen had delayed her permanent move from their Long Island home until 1957. It was a sizable investment – other homes in Desert Inn Estates sold for $32,000 at a time when the average new mass-produced house sold for less than half that amount. But the neighborhood and the house’s modern style both conveyed a prestige worthy of the expense. They selected a lot at 52 Country Club Lane (originally Twain Road) in the Desert Inn Estates, already one of the poshest neighborhoods in town.

Photograph courtesy of UNLV Special Collections.

The Desert Inn Hotel developed the property in 1952 as a series of sixty-five quarter-acre custom homes sites around the golf course behind the Desert Inn hotel bordered by the present day Desert Inn, Paradise, and Sands boulevards. The Modern style was set by the original clubhouse at the Desert Inn Country Club, designed by Powers, Daly, and DeRosa. A thoroughly modern design, it had large glass windows set in a framework of steel beams.

Photograph by Allen Sandquist, courtesy of the Morelli Collection, Special Collections Department, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Desert Inn Estates embodied the ideal of suburban living. Single family homes, most with swimming pools, sat in a beautifully landscaped setting but within an easy automobile drive to shopping and work. Morelli had a one-mile commute in his Cadillac convertible to the Sands. Antonio and Helen shared this neighborhood with many members of Las Vegas’s natural aristocracy in the entertainment industry, including singer Keely Smith, actress Betty Grable and band leader Harry James, and Desert Inn founder Wilbur Clark. Doctors, realtors, power company executives, and the family of future governor Bob Miller also lived there; Howard Hughes’s right hand man Robert Mayheu had a home in Desert Inn Estates; and Hughes press secretary Kay Glenn bought the Morellis’ house in 1978.

Photograph by Allen Sandquist, courtesy of the Morelli Collection, Special Collections Department, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

A city’s homes reflect the fashions, technology, and society of the times in which they are built. The ornate nineteenth century brownstone townhouses on the crowded streets of Boston, New York, and Baltimore, for example, represented solid, up-to-date, middle class housing for their times. In the 1950s and 1960s much of the new wealth growing with Las Vegas’s expansion demanded Modern architecture, the style associated with progress and prosperity. The same trend could be seen in all the newly developing cities of the Sunbelt, from Florida to California.

Photograph by Allen Sandquist, courtesy of the Morelli Collection, Special Collections Department, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Desert Inn Estates echoed this trend as did other custom home subdivisions such as Rancho Circle and the Scotch 80s. Many less expensive mass-produced tract homes also incorporated this new style including Charleston Heights (near Decatur Boulevard and Alta Drive) by developer Ernest Becker in 1952 and Paradise Palms, a subdivision designed by Southern California architects Palmer and Krisel (architects of the now-celebrated Alexander Homes in Palm Springs) for developer Irwin Molasky in 1963.

Photograph by Allen Sandquist, courtesy of the Morelli Collection, Special Collections Department, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Los Angeles architect Paul R. Williams (who had designed mansions for Hollywood moguls as well as the original Royal Nevada hotel on the Strip) designed homes in the Berkeley Square tract. These and other neighborhoods that are still to be documented and catalogued form a substantial stock of modern design buildings that deserve preservation.

Photograph courtesy of Alan Hess.

Southern California pioneered a simple, original modern architecture oriented to the out-of-doors since the 1910s in the work of Irving Gill, R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, Lloyd Wright, and Frank Lloyd Wright. In the 1920s and 30s, many considered this architecture wildly avant garde – acceptable to an extent in a new city like Los Angeles but not generally favored by the tastemakers in more traditional cities. By the 1950s, however, this style enjoyed a wider acceptance, especially by the middle class. In the boom years for construction after World War II, a host of talented young architects explored the possibilities of new materials for the new lifestyles and benign climate of the West.

Photograph courtesy of Alan Hess.

These architects developed several varying approaches. Architects such as Pierre Koenig, Raphael Soriano, William Cody, Richard Neutra, Albert Frey, Craig Ellwood, and Allyn E. Morris often used steel, lending their designs a crisp regularity. Others such as Whitney Smith, Wayne Williams, and A. Quincy Jones often used wood construction. Many of these architects participated in the Case Study program (1946-1966), a series of houses sponsored by Arts + Architecture magazine that became one of the most famous promotions of Modern design in the era.

Photograph courtesy of Alan Hess.

Like the simple geometries of the European-based Bauhaus Modernism of the 1920s, abstract flat-roofed boxes and exposed skeleton frames often dominated their aesthetic appearance. With the structure carried on a light frame instead of load-bearing walls, living room, dining room, kitchen, and family room spaces often flowed together in one open plan. Phoenix boasted similar work by Alfred Beadle, Ralph Haver, and others, demonstrating the common interest in Modernism shared by many western cities. The work of these architects was widely published in the leading architecture magazines and spread throughout the world as a distinctive interpretation of Modern ideals.

Photograph courtesy of Alan Hess.

The Morelli House’s more moderate version of Modern design relates to the work of Southern California architects Allen Siple, Edward Fickett, Paul R. Williams, the early work of E. Stewart Williams, and, in Tucson, Arthur Brown. In these houses the geometries are less rigorous or crystalline than in the squared-off Case Study houses. Instead of emphasizing the structural framework, they compose walls, planar roofs, and glass planes into a more relaxed collection of forms articulated in wood, stone, or stucco.

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