1,116 square foot Pearlman Mountain Cabin

The 1,116 square foot Pearlman Mountain Cabin is in the Idyllwild art community of Mount San Jacinto, California. It was designed by a renowned architect, then built by family.

The cabin was designed and built to be a weekend cottage for the family of a doctor in Santa Ana, a couple of hours away.

In 1956, Agnes Pearlman chose the site. It has an enormous boulder and was considered unbuildable. She commissioned architect John Lautner to design a small getaway house with an open plan that would incorporate the beautiful mountain setting.

“John Lautner visited the Pearlman cabin site, he sat and meditated over a rock in the site. This rock rendered the site unbuildable. There he ambitioned an open cylinder structure with a platform deck around it with a circular roof covering it, and tree trunks supporting the roof with a serrated glass screen expanding the space toward the forest and the mountains beyond.”

Nicholas Olsberg
Quoted in Pearlman Cabin Historic Report
Library of Congress

John Lautner apprenticed with the Taliesin Fellowship led by Frank Lloyd Wright. He established his own architecture practice in Los Angeles in 1938, while continuing to work with Frank Lloyd Wright on residential projects. House & Garden featured photos and plans of a home Lautner designed. Over the years, his designs were highlighted in at least 275 articles.

By 1956 Lautner was a well-established architect. He designed a small circular mountain cabin with a wood deck on one edge and a bathroom and small storage room on the other edge. Altogether, the cabin would be around 1000 square feet.

The cabin was designed by John Lautner around the time he designed Silvertop, one of his most famous works. Both works use skylights and glass panels to open the interior to views all around.

The Pearlman Mountain Cabin was finished the next year, 1957. It was built by Agnes Pearlman’s brother, Bill Branch and other family members.

The entire house is small, just a little over a thousand feet.

The designs were complete enough that, even without much knowledge of construction he was able to follow the plans.

(Silvertop wasn’t finished until 1976, no fault of the design.)

Very little has been altered. The storage room was later turned into a bedroom, that’s about it.

The house was designed to fit into the setting.

The deck and windows overlook the downslope. The ceiling is angled so that it becomes nearly invisible looking out.

The roof is supported by cedar tree trunks. Expanses of glass look out to the  mountain view.

Almost a primitive hut, the modest Pearlman Mountain Cabin in Idyllwild art colony—high on western slope of Mt. San Jacinto—was built for accomplished amateur musicians who summered there. A wooden building in a wooded setting, it is essentially a circular room of music, sitting, cooking and sleeping. Two thirds of its perimeter is a solid wall with a clerestory of small rectangular windows. Lined up along this wall are a hearth, a desk for writing, a large window precisely framing an immense oak, two beds, and a tiny kitchen. The other third of the enclosure opens to the surroundings. Two wings extend out from the body of the house to frame this opening, one a terrace, the other a bedroom suite. The roof is a fattened disk with a flat circular center and tapered edges, folded down to the wall at the back, and crimped up at the large opening in the front. The construction of the roof is less complicated than its form may suggest: wooden trusses, braced at the center of the house, radiate out to support it. Across the opening, the roof rest on a row of actual tree trunks. Enormous sheets of glass set directly into these logs form a delicate screen through which one gazes with wonder at the panorama unfolding beyond.

Pearlman Cabin, Idyllwild, Riverside County, CA
Library of Congress