ELROD HOUSE

Contributed by: The James Bond Movie Encyclopedia by Steven Jay Rubin

Real name of the futuristic house featured as the desert residence of billionaire Willard Whyte (Jimmy Dean) in Diamonds Are Forever. Designed by the late architect John Lautner and valued at nearly $8 million in a 2016 sale, the concrete-and-glass house has nearly eight thousand square feet of space and is situated on about twenty-three acres in Palm Springs, California. Built for interior designer Arthur Elrod in 1968, the house, likened to a spaceship, has a circular living room sixty feet across with skylights radiating from the center like the petals of a desert flower. The home also has an indoor/outdoor pool and a two-bedroom guest house.

Lautner, one of the greatest American contemporary architects, was still actively working on projects at the time of his death at age eighty-three, in October 1994.

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