“Charlie Martin was mad and a bit of a wild man,” says Bruno Sargeant, a Yorkshire-born producer for Meta. Sargeant escaped LA’s Melrose Avenue jungle for the more sedate and peaceful environs of Pinyon Crest, high above Palm Desert. “There was a story about him [Martin] going on a trip to Alaska, where he bought a seaplane. He brought it back with him to the desert to install in his offices in Palm Desert. He couldn’t fit the wings in his office, so he tore down the wall to the office next door to fit the plane in.”
In a place like the Coachella Valley, there’s no shortage of eccentric architects. (Albert Frey was a yogi and an ice cream addict; Richard Neutra supervised construction of the Kaufmann Desert House while floating in a pool.) But, Martin stood out. He never attained the worshipful notoriety of William Cody or Donald Wexler, or the rarefied air of John Lautner and Neutra, or the prolificacy of William Krisel.
But, Martin claimed to be responsible for the Valley-wide appearance of small, Pueblo style homes, which he dubbed “ranch burgers.” His creations stood out for their sheer audacity. There’s the La Quinta house built with a “skin” of corrugated aluminum panels, dubbed the Tin House. And there’s the Bunker House in Palm Desert, which was built into the ground to provide maximum privacy and protection from the sun and extreme heat.
These homes weren’t just fanciful; they were part of Martin’s lifelong efforts to create energy-efficient and sustainable structures. His Williamson House was the first privately funded structure built in the United States that was heated and cooled by solar panels.
Martin’s commercial work was equally intense; he designed beautiful sanctuaries. Saint George Greek Orthodox Church and Saint Garabed Armenian Apostolic Church of the Desert are two of his finest creations. Without doubt, his finest (and most whimsical) creation is the building for which he should be rightly remembered: the Rancho Mirage Observatory. Its sighting over the Whitewater arroyo and the eclectic combination of materials like wood, concrete, and rusted steel reveal a creativity unfettered by convention.
Martin was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1940 and later moved to Bellingham, Washington. He obtained a degree in architecture from the University of Washington in 1962, according to his obituary. And he was one of only 24 American architecture students invited to study with Paolo Soleri at his studio near Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1964.
Instead of waiting to be drafted, Martin joined the Army and attended both Officer Candidate School and Ranger School. He got married during that time; later, he was sent to Vietnam and served as a First Lieutenant with the 36th Ranger Battalion (an infantry unit of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam – ARVN). During his service in Vietnam, Martin was awarded two Bronze Star Medals with clusters and a Purple Heart.
After he left the military, Martin returned to the architecture trade in Seattle. There, his firm was awarded a contract to design the Cabrini Medical Tower, a 19-story medical facility. It’s probably as close to true brutalism as Martin ventured. A few years later, he moved his family to the Coachella Valley, where he eventually opened an office called Narkweather Architects, Inc. in Palm Desert. Martin’s seaplane was installed near that office. He died in 2020.
Okay, maybe Martin was a bit mad, but the madness was clearly proportionate to his genius. And no other work of his demonstrates that delicate balance more than the home he designed for himself but never finished building: the concrete monolith in Pinyon Crest sometimes called the Concrete House or the Brutalist House. It features a type of severe, adornment-free, concrete-slab architecture that proliferated in England, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe in the 1950s and ‘60s. Often derided as cold and humorless, the structure was inspired by socialist principles and created as a reaction against the sentimental architecture of the post-war era.
“There really isn’t brutalist architecture in this country,” says Sargeant, who acquired Martin’s dream home in 2021. Sargeant believes that the concrete house aligns more with Martin’s environmental vision and execution than any overtly brutalist influences. “I think Martin’s inspiration, his designs for the house, changed as he built it. You look at the original design; it was more like a Moroccan castle. But then, his design changed as it was being built. One day, it was a castle, and the next day, it morphed into a concrete ship charting a journey through the mountains.”
Sargeant listed the one-bedroom home on the market over a year ago. (Currently, it’s priced at $1,289,000.) Friends and neighbors told Sargeant that Martin’s project is his “toe-tag home,” meaning that the only way he’ll ever leave it is by coffin. He found it during the pandemic while taking long drives from LA and looking for a new home. He says he realizes that what he was really looking for was a place that would change his life.
He comes by such inclinations naturally. Sargeant’s parents once moved the family to a remote cottage in the Yorkshire wilds. Another time, they owned an island off the coast of Ireland. “I grew up in homes that were never completely finished,” he says, “So, the fact that I might be working on this place for the rest of my life doesn’t bother me at all.”
When Sargeant first spied the house on one of his forays, he invited himself in for a look around. The previous owners didn’t get very far in renovating it, long after acquiring the house in the early 2000s, and it was only inhabitable by mountain fauna. Sargeant recalls sitting on the floor and feeling completely at peace in the silence and solitude of his surroundings. He called his realtor and told him he found his home. “My realtor told me that I was absolutely mad,” he recalls. “Then, he came up and saw it, and said to me, ‘Do it.’”
Martin left the building far from complete when he walked away, and the years were not kind to it. Sargeant admits that he had absolutely no experience when he took on the house as a lifetime project. “I estimated the cost of making it livable and then tripled it,” he says. Sargeant immediately joined the Pinyon Crest HOA and discovered Martin’s original plans in the corner of a storage container. “And then, I almost immediately went over [the original budget].” To start the project, he replaced the entire roof. He says he needed 10 truckloads of concrete to finish half-completed sections. “I went into this knowing it was going to be a life-changing experience.
“You can see [Martin’s] struggles with cashflow by looking at the construction,” Sargeant says. “I think cost overruns basically forced him to give it up. He would drive the contractors crazy with changes. He’d tell them one thing and then go away and smoke a reefer and then come back and have them do it differently because he’d had an idea.”
It took Sargeant more than four years to make the first floor of Martin’s vision livable. But, along the way, he began to appreciate the architect’s genius. “There’s some absolute genius in the design of the structure,” he says. “It’s near perfectly aligned to what they call the azimuth, so east-west … and how it’s angled for the weather. We can have major storms up here, and you don’t really feel anything. It can almost be hurricane weather outside and … the wind just hits the pointed end of the building and wraps around and doesn’t come in.”
Not surprisingly, Martin used his dream home as a kind of large-scale laboratory to work out some of his environmental and energy-efficient ideas. One idea that still works well is the fact that the walls contain thermal breaks filled with foam. That allows for “very little transference of heat or cold from outside to inside,” Sargeant says. Other ideas, such as pipes connected to a large water tower outside that heat the walls, didn’t quite work. Sargeant installed solar-powered pumps that made them work.
He says the second floor is as extraordinary as the rest of the structure, with 16-foot ceilings and shoulder-height, slit windows that are perfect for a sniper. Sargeant says shooting with a sniper rifle was Martin’s specialty during his time in Southeast Asia. We’ll never know whether Martin meant it as a dark humor commentary on his past or thought he might have to fight off intruders.
Sargeant's faced the fact that he will probably never achieve 100% of Martin’s vision, because of changes in building codes and/or impracticality. (For example, the bed in the master bedroom on the second floor was designed to swing out from the building so residents can enjoy the night sky.) But, he’s determined to press on, cash flow or unexpected buyer be damned.
“I’m completely unqualified to do anything like this,” Sargeant says. “It’s insane. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
