Mills House

Mark Mills came to Carmel to build another architect's masterpiece — supervising construction of Frank Lloyd Wright's Della Walker house on Carmel Beach. When the work was done, he stayed. The house on Mission Street was the first he designed in Carmel, and he made it his own home, living there from 1954 to 1957. Nearly every change the house has seen since came from Mills himself, so the building survives as something rare: an architect's first Carmel work, altered almost exclusively by its architect, its record intact.

The rehabilitation is held to that record. Every opening across the property — windows, doors, skylights — was surveyed and documented before anything was proposed to replace it. The research went deep into Mills' original construction details — and found, in them, intentions he never carried out. Not everything Mills designed for the house was built; the drawings recover those intentions and return them to the project. The city approved the rehabilitation without revisions. The work ahead will perpetuate Mills' original vision.