During the summer of 1950, artist Saul Steinberg was in Los Angeles so that he could appear as Gene Kelly’s hand double in the movie “An American in Paris.” He was quickly disenchanted with the project (he decried the output of the movie studio as “Technicolor musicals, stupid stuff”) but he and his wife, artist Hedda Sterne, decided to stay in California anyway. They kept company with Igor Stravinsky, Gene Kelly (no hard feelings, apparently), Christopher Isherwood, Billy Wilder, Oscar Levant, and Charles and Ray Eames.

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By the mid-1940s, people in and around the New York offices of Fortune magazine had just about had it with Colonial Revival. In 1946, the writer Eric Hodgins published the wry short story "Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle” in its pages, spinning a tale of well-heeled Manhattanites who move to rural Connecticut with their two daughters hoping to cultivate a life of bucolic tranquility. Instead, they find nothing but headaches, structural problems, and lawsuits. (In the 1948 movie that was eventually made from the novel-length version of Hodgins’s story, the father is played to exasperated perfection by Cary Grant.)

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