Industrial Designer, United States Craig Ellwood is credited with designing some of the most elegant modern houses built in California in the 1950s and 1960s, but he was not educated as an architect. Born Jon Nelson Burke, in Clarendon, Texas, Burke established in 1946 a small construction company to take advantage of the house-building opportunities offered by the G.I.Bill. To avoid any recriminations should the business fail, the company operated under the fabricated name of “Craig Ellwood Inc.” The company did fail, although Burke retained the name Craig Ellwood for professional reasons, adopting it legally in 1951. Ellwood then worked as a cost estimator for a firm of modern-house builders in Los Angeles, Lamport, Cofer, Salz-man, while operating from the same address as “Craig Ellwood, Industrial Designer.” While there, Jack Cofer asked him to design his first house, for Milton Lappin, in 1948. Although somewhat awkwardly planned and derivative of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sturges Hous...