The $10 Hook That Belongs in a Masterpiece
At Frey House II, even the bathrobe hook was modernist.
In Palm Springs, the high desert light has a way of making everything feel essential. Albert Frey understood this better than anyone. When he built Frey House II in 1964, he famously painted the roof sky blue, chose curtains the color of wildflowers, and let a giant boulder share the living room. Nothing was decoration for decoration’s sake—it all belonged.
Which is why this bathrobe hook, still sold at the hardware store today for under $10, feels like such a revelation. This is not a designer piece with a signature price tag. It is ordinary. It is available. And yet it is exactly what Frey chose.
Look closely and you see why: the simplicity, the clarity of purpose, the way it refuses to be more than what it is. Modernism was never about status. It was about stripping away until only truth remained. If a hook from the hardware aisle served the function perfectly, then that was modernism.
William Cody built glamour from Cahuilla stone, Richard Neutra turned light into structure, and Frey? He picked the humblest hardware and gave it dignity. The same hook you could buy today in Palm Springs—or Seattle, or anywhere—became part of an icon of desert modernism.
That’s the lesson: modernism doesn’t always announce itself with a cantilever. Sometimes it hides in plain sight, costing less than lunch.