Bob Hope Residence
John Lautner · Palm Springs
The Bob Hope Residence
A volcano in the desert — and what Lautner said about it
Palm Springs, California · 1979 · John Lautner, Architect
Bob Hope Residence, Palm Springs, 1979 — John Lautner, Architect · Photo: James Perry
Seen from above, the Bob Hope Residence reads as something the desert produced rather than something placed upon it — a low volcanic form rising from the valley floor, its concrete roof sweeping outward in a continuous curve that echoes the mountain ridgelines surrounding Palm Springs on three sides. From the ground, approaching on the long drive, it materialises slowly: less a house than a geological event, 24,000 square feet of reinforced concrete anchored into an affluent hillside neighbourhood as though it had always been there.
Lautner knew it would look this way before the first form was poured. In 1978, while the building was still under construction, he stood before an audience at SCI-Arc and described what he was doing in a single, precise sentence. The cone, he said, had the same slope as a volcano — and it had to, because the site demanded it. That clarity of purpose — geological form as functional response — is the key to reading this building correctly.
Building Data
Architect: John Lautner
Location: Southridge, Palm Springs, California
Completed: 1979
Area: 24,000 square feet
Programme: Private residence — entertainment hall + residential quarters
Structure: Cast-in-place reinforced concrete; 100-foot arches
Entertainment capacity: 200+ people (Lautner, 1978)
Current owner: Ron Burkle (purchased 2016); restoration by Helena Arahuete
Bob Hope Residence — aerial view showing the sweeping concrete roof form
The Architecture
The Form
The roof is the building. That is the clearest way to understand what Lautner did here. The sweeping concrete canopy — vast, low at its perimeter, rising to a central oculus — is simultaneously structure, shade, and the primary experience of the architecture. In the desert, where the sun is the dominant environmental force, a roof of this ambition is not a formal gesture. It is a functional one: the deep overhang shelters every elevation from direct solar exposure, and the curvature channels rainwater and controls the apparent mass of what is, by any measure, an enormous building.
But it was also programmatic. When Lautner described the building in 1978, he was explicit: this was to be a large entertainment space — capable of seating 200 people for dinner — set within a private residential programme on the upper level. The scale that reads from outside as geological is, from inside, a direct consequence of what the space needed to hold. The cone was not a signature; it was an answer.
Bob Hope Residence — original floor plan, John Lautner. The radial cone geometry and radiating wings are visible in plan; the entertainment hall occupies the central volume.
The plan reveals the logic that the aerial photograph only hints at. The radial geometry — a central cone with wings extending outward toward the terrain — is not decorative. Each wing is oriented to manage views and topography simultaneously: the Coachella Valley drops away to the north and west; the mountain ridges rise to the east. Lautner's arrangement holds both conditions from the interior at once — the wide valley and the close mountain backdrop — without any single room feeling exposed or disoriented. The building makes a place out of a hillside, rather than simply occupying one.
The 100-foot arches that carry the roof structure are the span necessary to achieve an unobstructed entertainment interior at this scale. Lautner mentioned them matter-of-factly in 1978, in the same breath as the cone slope and the volcano comparison — as technical facts that followed directly from the spatial requirement. The arch dimension is not an architectural flourish. It is the minimum structural solution to an extraordinarily ambitious room.
Primary Sources
What Lautner Said: Two Moments, Thirteen Years Apart
The SCI-Arc archives preserve two separate evenings on which Lautner discussed the Hope Residence — one in 1978, while the building was still under construction, and one in 1991, after a decade of living with what it had become. Together they form one of the more candid records we have of how a Lautner building was conceived and then, partially, dismantled.
1978 — Design Intent
"The basic shape is a cone, and those are 100-foot arches. And that cone has the same slope as a volcano, so it had to fit the site. This will be a big open entertainment room where you can have 200 people for dinner, and the rest is a second-floor living space."
John Lautner · SCI-Arc, 1978
This is Lautner in design-intent mode: precise, technical, and entirely confident. The volcanic slope is not a poetic description applied after the fact — it was the design criterion. The site dictated the cone angle; the cone angle produced the exterior form; the exterior form happened to read as something the desert had grown. This is the inside-out method made explicit. The appearance followed from the logic, not the other way around.
Bob Hope Residence — interior, Hammer Fellows Dinner, 2008. The scale of the entertainment volume Lautner described in 1978 reads as such.
1991 — The Outcome
"This is the Hope house. They don't want any publicity, and they got a Beverly Hills decorator who sort of ruined it anyway. It doesn't matter because they cancelled almost everything that was real, but there was still a good space with big overhangs for the hot sun."
John Lautner · SCI-Arc, 1991
Thirteen years later, the slide appeared on screen and Lautner moved past it in a few words. The disappointment is plain — the interior had departed significantly from his intentions, reshaped by outside decorating input the clients brought in after the design was complete. And yet his response was not to disown the building. He found what survived: the space itself, and the overhangs. In Lautner's hierarchy of architectural values, those two things — spatial experience and climate response — are always primary. The furniture, the finishes, the decorative layer: secondary. What the decorator changed, the structure beneath it absorbed.
The arc from 1978 to 1991 is instructive. It was an evening at SCI-Arc in 1991 on which Michael Rotondi — introducing Lautner to a packed house — had just described standing at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence and feeling compelled toward the precipice, the way one does at the rim of the Grand Canyon. That building, by contrast, appeared to have been delivered intact. The Hope Residence, discussed in the same session a few slides later, was the building that got away. Lautner held both without sentimentality. He noted what remained real, and moved on.
Bob Hope Residence — interior view. The spatial volume Lautner described in 1978 survives; the decorative treatment is not his.
Context
The Desert Pair: Hope and Elrod
The Hope Residence sits less than a mile from the Elrod House — the circular concrete masterpiece Lautner completed in 1968, later made famous as a Bond villain's lair in Diamonds Are Forever. The connection runs deeper than geography: the Hopes commissioned Lautner specifically because they admired the Elrod House and had originally intended to use Arthur Elrod himself for the interiors. When Elrod died in a car accident during the first construction phase, that plan died with him — and the interior eventually passed to the Beverly Hills decorator whose work Lautner lamented in 1991.
As built forms, the two buildings are formally very different propositions. The Elrod House works through a pure geometric idea — the circle, sixty feet in diameter, with its radial concrete-and-glass roof wheel. The Hope Residence works through continuous curvature: the sweeping volcanic cone that reads from the air as something grown from the valley floor. Where Elrod is precise and centred, Hope is expansive and directional. Together they demonstrate the range of Lautner's formal vocabulary in the desert: not a signature shape applied repeatedly, but a method — site-first, climate-conscious, interior-led — that generates a different answer each time the question is genuinely asked.
Restoration
The Building Gets Its Interior Back
In 2016 — more than two decades after Lautner's death in 1994 — the building changed hands in a way that altered its trajectory. Ron Burkle purchased the property for $13 million, well below its $50 million ask when it first came to market after Dolores Hope's death in 2011, and with an explicit ambition: to return the interior to something closer to what Lautner had originally envisioned. To lead the work, Burkle hired Helena Arahuete.
The name is significant. Arahuete — who had come to Los Angeles from Argentina in the 1970s and joined Lautner's office — was not brought in as a sympathetic outsider. She was the original 1977 project architect on the Hope Residence, working alongside Lautner during the reconstruction phase after the 1974 construction fire, when the building's design was finalised with a concrete roof in place of the original wood. When she returned in 2016, she was returning to her own project, guided by Lautner's archive at the Getty Research Institute and the building plans she had helped produce nearly forty years earlier.
The approach was to strip the Beverly Hills decorator's layer and replace it with what Lautner had intended: natural materials, light treated as a primary spatial element, the visual relationship between interior and desert landscape restored. The restoration was carried out with skilled artisans including master woodworkers Brian Cooney Sr. and Brian Cooney Jr., and was assisted by Lorenzo Jauregui — whose mother had worked for the Hopes for over thirty years, bringing an intimate institutional knowledge of the building's life.
What distinguishes the Arahuete restoration architecturally — as distinct from merely sympathetic — is the continuity of authorial intent it represents. This was not a historian's reconstruction or a preservationist's compromise. It was the original project architect completing, belatedly, what she and Lautner had set out to do. The Beverly Hills decorator arrived between. The building waited.
The Hope Residence is a building with an unusually complete paper trail: two Lautner lectures at SCI-Arc bookending the building's compromised middle years, original plans filed with the city, a Getty archive, and now a restoration carried out by the architect who built it the first time. That is an exceptional record for a private residence. It makes the building legible in a way most Lautner projects are not — you can trace the original idea, identify where it was compromised, and measure how much survived to be recovered. The cone calibrated to a volcano is still there. The 100-foot arches are still there. The space Lautner described in 1978 — with its desert views and its overhangs against the hot sun — is, at last, closer to what he had in mind.
Architectoid Organic Architecture Series
The Hope Residence is a case study in what Lautner called the whole idea under pressure — a building whose spatial logic survived client intervention because it was embedded in the structure, not applied to the surface. For the full framework behind his method, see the series prologue.
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