John Lautner in the Desert: The UFO House, the Elrod Residence, and Lautner's Coachella Valley Legacy
It was 1973, and production designer Ken Adam needed a villain's lair that felt genuinely alien — a space that could convince a worldwide cinema audience that a man named Blofeld might actually live here. He found it, already built, at 2175 Southridge Drive in Palm Springs. No set construction required. The Elrod House, completed by architect John Lautner just five years earlier, was so otherworldly that Diamonds Are Forever used it exactly as it stood. Real house. Real desert. Unreal vision.
What is John Lautner's legacy in Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage, and why do his homes still command some of the highest prices in the Coachella Valley?
John Lautner designed fewer than 200 buildings in his entire career — and two of his most spectacular commissions landed in the desert communities of the Coachella Valley. Those two structures alone have shaped how architects, collectors, and luxury buyers think about desert modernism for the past half-century.
The Elrod House: Where Bond Met the Boulder
Lautner completed the Elrod House in 1968 for interior designer Arthur Elrod, and it remains one of the most arresting private residences in the American West. The home is built directly into the granite boulders of Southridge — not beside them, not around them, but with them, boulders emerging from the living room floor as though the desert refused to be excluded from the conversation.
The defining feature is the 60-foot circular concrete roof, a segmented disc that opens like a camera aperture over the main living space. Natural light tracks across the room as the sun moves, turning the interior into a slow-motion sundial. When the Diamonds Are Forever production team needed a space for Bambi and Thumper to battle James Bond, the answer was obvious: no stage could compete with what Lautner had already built.
The Elrod House changed hands in the 2010s for a reported price north of $10 million — a figure that underscores just how rarely these properties trade and how seriously the market prices them when they do. Every sale of a Lautner home is a market event, not just a transaction.
The Bob Hope Estate: 23,000 Square Feet of Desert Futurism
A few ridgelines away, at 1 Southridge Drive, sits the structure that locals have called the UFO house since the day it was finished. Bob Hope commissioned Lautner to design the estate in the late 1970s, and the result — completed in 1980 — is a 23,000-square-foot residence topped by a volcanic caldera roof form that appears to hover above the Coachella Valley like something that landed from elsewhere.
The estate sits on approximately 2.5 acres with panoramic views stretching from the San Jacinto Mountains across the valley floor toward Rancho Mirage and beyond. Lautner designed the roof as a poured concrete shell with a central oculus — simultaneously a skylight, a thermal chimney, and a piece of sculpture visible from the valley below. It is, by any measure, one of the most distinctive residential silhouettes in California.
Bob Hope lived there until his death in 2003. The estate sold in 2016 for approximately $13 million after years on the market, a price that reflected both the extraordinary architecture and the very real challenge of maintaining a 23,000-square-foot concrete monument in the desert. Today it sits privately owned, occasionally surfacing in architectural tours and photography journals, its roofline still stopping first-time visitors cold.
What This Means For You
• Lautner homes are singular assets. Fewer than 200 Lautner buildings exist worldwide. When one trades in the Coachella Valley, it sets a pricing benchmark that ripples across the broader Palm Springs luxury market.
• Southridge Drive is an address in its own category. Both homes sit in Palm Springs' Southridge neighborhood — a hillside enclave where architectural pedigree, privacy, and panoramic views have commanded premium prices for decades.
• Desert modernism drives real demand. Buyers drawn to Palm Springs-area architecture — Neutra, Schindler, Wexler, and Lautner — are a distinct and active segment of the luxury market. Understanding that history helps you understand pricing.
• Architectural literacy matters when you're buying or selling here. A property connected to a named mid-century architect isn't just a home — it's a collectible. Work with someone who can help you evaluate that premium accurately.
The Coachella Valley has always attracted visionaries — people who looked at 110-degree summers and rocky desert ridgelines and saw possibility. Lautner was one of them. His two desert commissions aren't just beautiful buildings; they're proof that the most ambitious architecture in America sometimes gets built where most people wouldn't expect it. If you're exploring the Palm Springs luxury market and want to understand what separates a genuinely rare property from a well-staged one, that conversation starts with knowing who built what — and why it matters.
Ready to make your move in the Coachella Valley? Reach out to Shana Gates at Craft & Bauer. Contact Shana →
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the John Lautner Bob Hope Estate located in Palm Springs?
The Bob Hope Estate is located at 1 Southridge Drive in Palm Springs, California, in the hillside Southridge neighborhood. The 23,000-square-foot home sits on approximately 2.5 acres with sweeping views across the Coachella Valley floor, and its distinctive volcanic caldera roofline is visible from much of the valley below.
Did the Elrod House really appear in a James Bond film?
Yes — the Elrod House at 2175 Southridge Drive in Palm Springs was used as the villain's compound in the 1971 Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. The production used the home exactly as built, requiring no modifications, because Lautner's 60-foot circular concrete roof and boulder-integrated interior were already cinematic beyond anything a set designer could construct.
How much do John Lautner homes sell for in Palm Springs?
Lautner homes are extraordinarily rare and priced accordingly. The Elrod House reportedly sold for more than $10 million, and the Bob Hope Estate sold in 2016 for approximately $13 million. Because so few Lautner buildings exist, every sale is treated as a benchmark event in the broader Palm Springs luxury real estate market.