15 leather-bound presentation albums by Maynard Parker showcasing the Regency-style interiors of Paul Granard, designer for Golden Age Hollywood stars

The albums present Granard’s designs for the Beverly Hills homes of some of the 1940s brightest personalities, including actress and pin-up model Betty Grable (“I became a star for two reasons, and I’m standing on them”), Henry Fonda (holdout juror of "12 Angry Men," father of Jane and Peter), and Bert Lahr (the Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion). For Lahr’s house, Granard collaborated with Paul Revere Williams, a once-overlooked Black architect who has recently been championed as a pioneer in his field. Also included is the residence of Mike Lyman—whose "Mike Lyman's Grill" was a favorite haunt of Hollywood elite and (perhaps for that reason) F. Scott Fitzgerald—as well as the houses of several lesser-known figures.

The images are all Maynard Parker’s, the influential architectural photographer whose glam-home shots capture the domestic aspirations of the post-War era. Parker is a Hollywood counterpart to Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman, evoking the easy luxury of home life to their high-minded vision of the American civic realm. He got his start in the pages of the Home Beautiful under the editorship of Elizabeth Gordon, an arbiter of homemaking taste who railed against the International Style—practiced by the likes of Mies, Richard Neutra, and Phillip Johnson—as cold and even totalitarian.

Parker’s photographs speak of a time when the post-War housing boom and mass consumerism were rewriting American ideals. Ascendant—mostly white—middle-class families were fleeing cities for the promise of two cars in their garage and a chicken in their pot. A suburban mystique underwrites the albums: there are parlors for entertaining guests, sun-drenched dining rooms, closets stocked with cocktail dresses and suits, telephones on the side tables, and kitchens with all modern appliances.

The albums also evoke the darker aspects of the era. Latent are the gendered orders of home life—powder rooms and vanities for her, smoking dens and book-lined studies for him—and undertones of social isolation. One of the houses belongs to Norman Panama, who produced the 1944 "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House," a comedy-of-errors about a New York City advertising exec who tries to move his family to Connecticut. Blandings faces a host of issues with his new house and spends the rest of the film trying to fix them, all while struggling with his job and doubting his wife’s fidelity. The photographs of Henry Fonda and Frances Seymour Brokaw’s house ran in Home Beautiful in 1948, under the headline “The Fonda’s Formula for Successful Living.” Just two years later, Brokaw would be admitted to a sanatorium after Fonda asked for a divorce.

The covers of the albums are imprinted with the name of the homeowners, save for one which reads “Paul Granard Interiors”. Maynard Parker is a well-collected photographer, but complete albums of his are rare. Paul Granard, though less well-documented, is enjoying renewed interest after a 2012 monograph of Parker’s domestic photographs (Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream, edited by Jennifer A. Watts. Yale University Press.) and as one of Paul Revere Williams’ collaborators.