1255 E Via Estrella

The Factor Residence (Hank Webber + Don Staska, 1969) 

When Jerome Factor commissioned architects Hank Webber and Don Staska to design a desert retreat on one of Canyon Country Club's premier fairway lots in 1969, the brief was uncompromising: absolute privacy, monumental presence, and an interior world capable of housing one of the most remarkable private art collections in the American West.

The result — with interiors by the celebrated Chicago decorator Richard Himmel and landscape architecture by David Hamilton, ASLA — was a compound that read, from the street, as a study in restraint. The brutalist stucco facade, entirely windowless and relentlessly horizontal, disclosed nothing of what lay within. It was, and remains, one of the most architecturally confident statements in Palm Springs: a house that keeps its own counsel.

Inside, the scale is immediate and total. Twelve-foot ceilings span 5,500 square feet of living space organized around a gallery-length entrance corridor — designed from the outset to display Pop and Op Art at a scale worthy of the work — and a vast living and entertaining sequence anchored by a black granite fireplace wall and framed by bronze-tinted glass walls opening to the San Jacinto Mountains. The pool terrace, engineered to accommodate events for up to three hundred guests beneath a canopied sky, completes a compound conceived for both intimate retreat and grand occasion.

The Factor Residence was featured across six pages of color photography in House Beautiful, April 1973 — a distinction that recognized not merely the architecture but the singular totality of the vision: building, landscape, furnishings, and collection conceived and executed as one. That totality endures. Nearly all of the furniture and art — museum quality, original to the Factor family — remains in place, an extraordinary continuity that transforms the estate from a significant residence into a living record of one of California's great mid-century collecting traditions.

Documented in Steve Treinen's Canyon Country Club: History and Design of Palm Springs' Garden of Eden and recognized among the finest preserved examples of large-scale California Modern architecture in the Coachella Valley, the Factor Residence is offered for the first time since 2017. At 5,500 square feet on a half-acre fairway lot, with three bedrooms, five baths, and an irreplaceable collection intact, it represents a convergence of architecture, history, and provenance that the market will not see again.

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