Timothy Street-Porter
David Zippel (left) and Michael Johnston pose in the hallway of their meticulously renovated home.
The view from the long, custom couch in David Zippel and Michael Johnston’s living room is unreal. Through the floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors, past the north-facing infinity pool, is a breathtaking panorama of the lush city of Palm Springs surrounded by the majestic San Jacinto Mountains to the west, the windmill-festooned San Gorgonio Pass, and the Little San Bernardino Mountains to the north. It is a view that turned out to be perception-altering and life-changing for Zippel.
Photographed by Timothy Street-Porter
“Michael has been coming to Palm Springs since he was young. He’s always loved it,” says Zippel, a lyricist, director, and producer whose Broadway debut, City of Angels, won him a Tony award. Subsequent work on plays such as The Goodbye Girl, Hercules and The Woman in White and films such as Mulan garnered him two Academy Award nominations and two Grammy Award nominations.
“I never got it,” says Zippel. “We’d be in New York and Michael would want to come to Palm Springs and I’d think, ‘Why? It’s cold there, too. Why not just keep flying until we get to Hawaii or the Caribbean?’ I just couldn’t understand the appeal.”
Then, on one fateful trip, the men visited a friend who was living in this very same William Cody-designed home. Zippel points to the patio set just outside the glass doors.
“We were sitting right there,” he says. “And I remember just staring out across the valley and thinking, ‘Oh, this is what they’ve been talking about. Now, I get it.’”
Photographed by Timothy Street-Porter
After the couple was on the same page, they began to spend more time in the Valley, to the point that Zippel estimates they were splitting their time 50/50 between New York and Palm Springs. They made the leap to ownership in 2009 when they came across a Cody house in the Las Palmas Heights neighborhood that badly needed resuscitation. It was just the kind of project Johnston had been waiting for.
Johnston was educated at USC’s prestigious School of Architecture. He started his career working in the design studio for William Pereira, a prolific modernist architect best known for designing San Francisco’s Transamerica building and drawing the master plans for the city of Irvine, the USC campus, and Pepperdine University. One day, Johnston received a call from a friend who’d been in the USC film program. He informed Johnston that there was a dearth of art directors in Hollywood and that he could get him hired immediately.
A hiatus that Johnston thought would last a year or two turned into a highly successful second career in which he art-directed movies such as The Fisher King and Single White Female. He met Zippel when he was interviewing with mutual friend Paul Rudnick to art direct Jeffrey. They were dating within a few months, but Johnston became dissatisfied with the peripatetic lifestyle that often kept them separated.
“It was a great career for the mid part of my life, but I didn’t want to finish my life being a traveling salesman,” he says.
Johnston began declining work until a film producer said to him that if he wasn’t going to art direct, then maybe he’d consider redoing the producer’s prewar Park Avenue apartment. That commission led to several more, and soon Johnston had a boutique firm of architects and designers renovating prewar apartments in New York.
Photographed by Timothy Street-Porter
The 1967 Las Palmas Cody (also known as Cody’s Las Palmas Glass House) came along when Johnston needed a break to work on his own project. It took over three years, but Johnston restored it to its original all-white interior and exterior motif. He added a seamless extension and redid the landscaping. In recognition of Johnston’s work, the Palm Springs Modern Committee awarded Johnston and Zippel its prize for architectural restoration of the year.
Though they had a beautifully restored Cody, they both considered the Cody house on Southridge to be “the Papa Cody.” They had spent time at the house in 2003 when a New York friend rented it for a couple weeks while he house-shopped. (That is when Zippel looked out across the valley and had his “aha” moment.) They followed the house from a distance.
The former owner had a contentious and litigious relationship with his Southridge neighbors and spent years fighting foreclosure, according to Zippel. Finally, in 2016, the former owner ran out of legal maneuvers and gave up the home to the Southridge Property Owners Association, who were owed several hundred thousand dollars.
“Then, the bank stepped in and said, ‘We’re taking it. We’re owed over a million,’” says Johnston.
The house went to auction three times. The first two times, the auction winners discovered just how much work the house required and backed out of the deal. The third winners were Zippel and Johnston. Despite the thrill of winning “the Papa Cody,” Zippel felt ambivalent.
“I loved our Cody Glass House,” he admits. “And this house needed so much work.”
“David said, ‘I’m not moving there until you finish it and I’m sure I like it,’” Johnston says.
Though the couple are understandably vague about cost, Johnston indicates that the auction price was over a million and a half and the renovation “cost millions.” (And auctions require cashier’s checks for the full amount — no financing.) The Cody Glass House was sold and a couple of retirement funds were cashed in. The couple was living on the edge in more ways than one.
On a tour of the house, Johnston guides his visitor to a small firepit on the north side of the pool to discuss how he approached the renovation. The house literally straddles the ridge. The backyard ends in an almost sheer cliff and the front yard (where the pool is located) looks out over the west end of the Valley to the San Gorgonio Pass. The Cody house is nestled in a depression in the ridge, like an inverted camel’s hump. Previous owners built walls against the boulder-strewn hillsides. Johnston tore them out, recognizing that the integration and juxtaposition of the straight lines, as well as the multitude of glass interacting with the natural forms of the environment, were an essential ingredient in desert modern architecture. Even though the huge boulder overhanging the kitchen might give one jitters during a mild quake, the 360-degree embrace of nature, both near and far, is breathtaking.
“It was a house that really had no connection with the landscape other than the front,” says Johnston. “And I wanted to take the house and really connect it with nature. I wanted the groomed area to literally float over the natural landscape.”
Photographed by Timothy Street-Porter
One of the most dramatic examples of this aspect of Johnston’s vision is the pool. It is set at the front of the property and elevated above the street; it originally was placed horizontal to the house. The problem was that it left no room at the hillside to the north, Johnston points out. Its position crowded the property and did not enhance it. So, in a move that had equal portions of simplicity, brilliance, and chutzpah, Johnston turned the pool 45 degrees. Well, you can’t actually turn a pool. He dug out the old pool and excavated for a new infinity pool facing north and south. It feels as if the far end of the pool ends in midair and that by swimming there, you’d sprout wings and take flight.
As Johnston guides his visitor from the back of the house through the master bedroom and bathroom, he explains that the project was given a huge boost when they contacted the former owner, commiserated over his loss of the house, and offered to buy the owner’s copy of Cody’s original plans.
“We said, ‘Anything you want to sell, we’ll buy. We’re so sorry this happened to you,’” Johnston said. “We ended up buying furniture. We bought the plans. And we had him up here and had this wonderful experience with him.”
Johnston was not trying to restore the house to exactly what it was the day the front doors were first thrown open, but he wanted to be faithful to Cody’s aesthetic and intent.
“We took it down to the studs,” he says. “I put in all new terrazzo floors. [Someone] had put in marble floors throughout the house. And that was not true to Cody’s drawings.”
Because the original owners bought the house on spec, they decided they didn’t want Cody to do all the finishes, according to Johnston. Since Arthur Elrod was the big name in the valley at that time, he was hired to “juice it up.” Johnston consulted both men’s plans in his renovation. He rebuilt cabinets when necessary but kept the original door handles, faucets, and other hardware. In the end, he redid nearly every surface of the house (one wall contained Elrod’s original wallpaper, which was lovingly protected), especially when the changes made by previous owners were inexplicable.
“Walnut was the wood specified in the plans (for cabinets),” says Johnston. “And in some places, (the previous owners) changed it to mahogany. It was crazy.”
Among the many upgrades that Johnston brought to the project was adding glass to a maid’s room that Elrod enlarged from the original plans. In the huge living room area, he designed the couches that create a large but intimate space for entertaining and installed a series of floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that face north across the Valley. Cleverly designed tracks for the doors allow them to slide away to create the ultimate indoor/outdoor space.
Cody’s original plans included a glass-enclosed terrarium in the entrance so one could literally look through the house from one end to the other. But, the house wasn’t built that way; the original owners wanted an enclosed entryway. Johnston went back to Cody’s plans. He replaced the walls with glass and created a small indoor pool that doubles as a decorative element and jacuzzi.
“It’s this very ephemeral feeling on top of this rocky mountain,” he says. “Everything’s rugged, but the architecture is subtle and ephemeral. I wanted the house to reflect the world, the pool to reflect the world, the sight lines to pass right through the house so that we lived as purely in nature as we possibly could.”
Johnston leads his visitor back to the master bedroom, where Zippel sits reading in a chair in a floor-to-ceiling glass corner.
“This is David’s reading corner,” Johnston says. “When he sits there, he can spin around and see the mountains. If he looks down the hallway, he can look out over the Valley.“
One wonders if Zippel immediately embraced Papa Cody after Johnston’s renovation.
Zippel chuckles. It’s apparent that it’s a question he’s been asked before.
“It’s not that,” he says. “It’s just that I wasn’t motivated to move.”
“He loved being in a village,” Johnston says, referring to their previous Cody and its more central location. “David's a very urban person. He was like, ‘I don't want to go live up on that hill.’ You love walking in the village, living among neighbors."
Zippel gives Johnston a wry look.
“Well, I realized before I embraced it that once he turned the pool 90 degrees, there was no going back,” he says. “(Mike) was going to want to live here. And this is certainly anything but a hardship post. As soon as I got up here, it felt like the other house, just on steroids. And what's not to love?”