Diamonds Are Forever

This 1968 Elrod home in Palm Springs is a futuristic concrete and glass landmark built over giant boulders and featured in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever.

Filed under: Home Types

The Elrod home in Palm Springs is a futuristic concrete and glass landmark built over giant boulders, which are incorporated into the living room and bedroom.

Go deep inside the villain's lair where 007 met up with two formidable femme fatales named Bambi and Thumper in Diamonds Are Forever. The James Bond films are noted for their amazing sets, and the Elrod home is no exception. Production designer Ken Adam created this one in Palm Springs in 1971. The lair — with its futuristic, fortress-like trappings — would set the standard for all Bond films to come, but this John Lautner masterpiece of modern architecture actually wasn't even close to what the script called for: a ranch house in a ghost town outside of Las Vegas and California.

: The famous fight sequence between Bond, Bambi and Thumper took place in the living room and concluded with all three in the home's swimming pool.
: This home has a combination indoor/outdoor swimming pool that's surrounded by enormous boulders.
: The exterior side of the pool highlights the beauty of the surrounding landscape.

In Diamonds Are Forever, Elrod was used as the home for a character named Willard Whyte (played by Jimmy Dean), the reclusive billionaire who holds a vital clue to the whereabouts of Blofeld, Bond's archenemy. It's no coincidence that Dean's character bears resemblance to Howard Hughes, a well-known billionaire of the time. There were discussions that maybe Hughes had died and his minions were running his empire, which sort of influenced the movie's story line, so the house needed to be something that would belong to a visionary, futuristic billionaire who knew design. The home incorporates rugged rock outcroppings to create a massive circular concrete and glass structure.

The house was a visionary choice for the filmmakers, but it wasn't their only trend-setting move. Whyte's two female bodyguards would set the stage for a new type of Bond adversary, and the most revolutionary move of all would be casting Trina Parks, the first African-American woman ever in the film series. To paraphrase a line from the Ian Fleming novel, "Nothing is forever but diamonds, death and great architecture." This home remains true to the cool and timeless secret-agent style that is James Bond.