William Krisel's Butterfly Roofs

Palm Springs home with a butterfly roof

This isn't the first home with a butterfly roof on this blog. One architect renowned for butterfly roofs was William Krisel. The style, as you can see from the image above, is one where two slanted parts of the roof meet each other in the middle.

Some of  Krisel's homes, which were built in the 1950s, came with butterfly roofs. The architect designed different roofs for some 2000 homes, many with unique slants that made the homes look similar to to one another.

His homes were some of the first mass-produced modern homes in Palm Springs. Before the 1950s if you wanted a modern home, you'd pay a pretty penny for it. Krisel made homes with butterfly roofs affordable. 

Homes with butterfly roofs built by Krisel are often called Alexanders after the name of the developer of Krisel designed homes, Bob Alexander. Krisel didn't design individual homes, but preferred working with developers to build tracts of homes because these types of developments offered him steady work designing many homes.

The homes originally sold for about $20,000, but today go for nearly a million for some of the higher-end ones.

If you notice, the architecture of many of the new shopping developments contain buildings with slanted roofs. It's become a design that has a Palm Springs trademark.