Alfred Preis

Scudder-Gillmar Residence (1939-1941)

Arguably Preis’s first residence, the Mr. & Mrs. F.S. Scudder Residence, was commissioned in 1939 by a Honolulu socialite as her home and as a source of additional income. It was part of an eight-unit, two-story apartment building by Dahl & Conrad and Alfred Preis designed in International and Streamline Moderne styles. The simple exterior of the residence was laid out as a white rectangular form that echoed the houses of the 1932 Vienna Werkbund housing exhibition. Preis’s asymmetrical window arrangement also echoed Loos’s villas. Large, sliding glass doors fronted the house and acted as a formal entrance and a way to provide a modicum of indoor-outdoor living, a growing interest of Hawaii’s modern architects. A balcony wrapped the side of the house and shaded the walkway to the family entrance. A visitor therefore had to walk alongside the house from the street to access the door, turning right to enter the house through a small foyer.

Preis designed all the interior furnishings for the house, including a dining table that stood on three legs that closely resembled Wiener Werkstätte furniture design. From there, the low ceiling gave way to a double-height space in white, brightly lit by the front sliding door and upper window. This dramatic change in ceiling height exemplified Loos’s vision that rectangular volumes could be segmented spatially and economically, with marked transitions in levels.

A central hearth with built-in bookcases anchored the center of the living room. Winding around it was a wooden staircase. Here, the similarity to Loos’s Doppelhaus design at the 1932 Werkbund Exhibition is so strong that it suggests that Preis drew on Loos’s design directly—either from memory or from the published photos. Built-ins around the balcony and bedroom loft had imaginative door pulls rendered in different shades of wood, with sliding doors and hidden compartments. These furnishings not only saved space, but they also fostered tactile interactions with the units.

These small details – which Preis would repeat in most of his later homes (his kitchens often feature “hidden” compartments and sliding pass-through openings between spaces) – created psychological pleasure through their architectural interactions. Preis attempted to make furniture not only beautiful, but also patently fun to manipulate.