Houses- the International Style

Davidson designed his first homes in the mid-1930s. The unbuilt residence for Richard Bransten in San Francisco (1931), while on the outside a radical project in the modern architectural language of ribbon windows, portholes, flat roof and stacked white volumes, was less modern in its interior, following a bourgeois floor plan with separate service stairs and quarters.

The Stothart House (1938) for the composer and MGM director, was designed in the same architectural language of the International Style, so-called after the Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1932, shown shortly afterwards at Bullock’s Wilshire in Los Angeles. Davidson integrated the house even further into the terrain, orientating the entire property toward the pool and garden and merging inside and outside into each other.

At the Feingold Medical Center (1940), a property with two façades on a street corner, the glass encased entrance lit up like a lantern at night, functioning as a sign for the car driver. Potted plants on the inside merged with the nature outside, making the outdoor-indoor transition almost invisible—an element Davidson used in almost all of his projects.

The Gretna Green Apartments (1941) had much in common with European row house projects, which attempted to maximize living space in a minimal area. But whereas the row house achieved this through repetition, standardization and prefabrication, Davidson managed to design four independent apartments with separate entrances, each giving the resident private outdoor space. Only two of the four apartments were mirrored.

In the vacation home for Blake G. Smith in Laguna Beach (1944), inspired by the desire for an unobstructed view of the ocean, Davidson produced his first fully developed open floor plan.