'Handcrafted Modern': Details of designers' homes

In 2006, armed with her trusty Mamiya RZ67 camera, 40 rolls of Kodak Portra film, and the lofty vision of a book about the personal habitats of iconic midcentury-modern designers, San Francisco photographer Leslie Williamson initiated a little bit of trickery to shoot the first project on her list: late Swiss architect Albert Frey's petite steel-and-glass domicile, which overlooks Palm Springs from its craggy roost on a San Jacinto mountainside.

"Unless you're an architectural scholar or something, you can't go inside the house," says Williamson of the 800-square-foot Frey House II, which the architect, who died in 1998, bequeathed to the Palm Springs Art Museum. "I just told them I was doing a book, even though I didn't have a publisher at the time." She spent two days - "The most joyful two days," she says - documenting the home, from the dinnerware Frey immaculately organized in the kitchen cupboards to the pink phone mounted above the toilet to the yellow drapes in the living room, color-coordinated with the encelia bush's golden blooms, visible in spring through the home's substantial glass windows.

Four years later, Williamson, who studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, realized her ambition with "Handcrafted Modern" (Rizzoli; $45). While the book's title conveys a deep admiration of the painstaking handiwork found within the private domains of legendary midcentury designers (more on this later), it's the seemingly unremarkable details (Frey's aforementioned pink phone, for example) that captivated Williamson the most. "They helped shape true portraits of the designers," says the San Jose native, who admits to texting her friends from Charles and Ray Eames' bluffside dwelling in Pacific Palisades (Los Angeles County): "I'm at the Eames house!" she squealed through the ether.

In fact, the iconic Eames pad - a.k.a. Case Study House No. 8 - is full of these endearing ordinary discoveries: a pair of wire-rimmed glasses in a small porcelain dish was allegedly part of a Benjamin Franklin costume worn by Charles; a charming light-blue gingham pillow on their bed boasts a hole lovingly darned with green thread; and on Page 13 of the book, an image of two bobby pins on Ray's nightstand. "They made me think about how she wore her hair," says Williamson, whose respectful curiosity has been honed through her work as a portrait photographer. "I shot things that were interesting to me and made me think about the designers in different ways."

Williamson's preconception of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius (1883-1969) changed dramatically after she photographed his home in Lincoln, Mass. "He's never smiling in any of his pictures and his bow tie is quite stiff - I always found him super-intimidating," says the author, who wrote the 224-page book in first person to tender her insightful, and often warm, observations as a heartfelt admirer of Modernism, not as a stern authority (a point she's careful to make early on).

However, amid the home's interior landscape, appointed with the Bauhaus' greatest hits (Marcel Breuer's tubular metal furniture and Eero Saarinen's Womb chair, for example) and hundreds of books ranging in topic from design (Le Corbusier's "Le Modulor") to anthropology ("The Naked Ape" by Desmond Morris), Williamson uncovered, among other anonymous details, Gropius' favorite duck a l'orange recipe and self-monogrammed bath towels, emblazoned with the architect's esteemed surname in faded black marker. Williamson amusingly writes in her introduction, "He was no longer an icon of Modernism. He was a guy worried about losing a towel."