The Famous Midcentury Architecture That Inspired the Parr House in Pixar’s “Incredibles 2”

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on June 4, 2018, and has since been updated to include current information. Veteran Pixar filmmaker Ralph Eggleston passed away on August 28, 2022, after battling pancreatic cancer. 

Fans of Pixar’s hit The Incredibles franchise know that the suburban, ranch-style home of its undercover superheroes, the Parr family, gets destroyed at the end of the first movie (released by Walt Disney Studios in 2004). The 2018 sequel—set in a retro-futuristic version of the 1960s—sees the animated brood move into a sprawling midcentury masterpiece, where Bob (Mr. Incredible) acts as a stay-at-home dad to Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack, while Helen (Elastigirl) leads a high-profile crime-fighting campaign.

To create the Parr family’s new, massive mansion made of glass, wood, and stone, the Incredibles 2 design team drew inspiration from actual midcentury-modern residences across the country. A group of the filmmakers traveled to Palm Springs and the surrounding areas to tour homes by the likes of Albert Frey and other formative modernists in the Southern California desert. They also spent time at Sunnylands, a 200-acre Rancho Mirage estate designed by A. Quincy Jones in the mid-’60s.

"It’s fun to look at architecture, and it’s part of what I do," says Pixar Animation Studios animator, art director, and production designer Ralph Eggleston, whose credits include Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars, WALL-E, and his Oscar-winning short, For the Birds. "All of our films require different worlds. I really delved into architecture on this film in particular."

Earlier in the year before Incredibles 2 was released, Eggleston led a presentation at Palm Springs Modernism Week called Incredibles 2–Storytelling with Art & Architecture. There are also "making-of" books for both films that detail the process of crafting each on-screen universe. Interestingly enough, the Parr House has gone on to inspire some real-life architecture of its own: A multiuse building in Cotino, a planned community Disney is developing in Rancho Mirage, is set to resemble the Incredibles 2 mansion, and in summer 2024, Disney collaborated with Airbnb Icons to recreate another memorable house from the franchise—Edna Mode’s design lab and mansion—as a rental property.

Around the debut of Incredibles 2, we sat down with Eggleston to hear more about the inspiration behind the architectural design of the Parr family mansion. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In Incredibles 2, Helen’s new job to bring the "Supers" back is what leads the Parr family to move into this awesome midcentury manse. 

It’s a temporary home for them after living in a 30-foot hotel room. It’s really fun, you get to see the stir-crazy aspect of them living in this little, midcentury motel room next to the interstate, and then this 20,000-square-foot home on a precipice.

It looks like the mansion echoes much of the same midcentury design and decor influences as their more traditional suburban home from the first movie. 

It’s riffing on the original film a little, which was in the 1950s. They lived in an Eichler-inspired home that was about 1,500 square feet. We designed an entirely new home for them for this film. It’s a house that they think they can adjust to, and they then realize it’s just really not what they need. So it’s a character in the movie.

Where did you draw inspiration for the architecture and interior? 

Homes like James Evans’s Evans House in New Canaan, Connecticut, with its cantilevered angles. We didn’t want to get stuck entirely in Palm Springs [for modern architecture influences]. Palm Springs makes it easy for one-stop shopping for this kind of stuff. We were inspired also by the house in the 1968 Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards movie The Party.

Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and Alden B. Dow’s Midland, Michigan, home, the Parr house embraces a watery landscape. 

There is a waterfall behind the house, and it travels through a lot of the rooms. The water continues down beneath the house and runs down the stream toward Metroville.  

What are some of the nontraditional or futuristic features you incorporated to make the house feel fit for its superheroes?

At the time, not many homes had PA systems. It also has a lot of private entrances and exits. A fireplace opens and reveals an elevator down to a secret garage where Helen gets her Elasticycle. There are lots of little things like that. 

We took the best of everything and crammed it into the house. The one thing we get to do as designers is make it look like it all works, but we don’t have to worry about code. Jack-Jack, Dash, and Violet all have fireplaces in their bedrooms. You’d never put a fireplace in a baby’s bedroom, right? 

There are also lots of steps and stairs, [as well as] angles in the house that make the viewer want to wander forward. That was very intentional and part of the character of the home. 

How does the house function for the Parr family’s day-to-day lifestyle?

In our trip to Palm Springs, we visited Sunnylands, an Annenberg estate built in 1966 that is only used for presidents and dignitaries. One of the things about that house: the [original, namesake owners] wanted these big, grand rooms and entrances for meetings. Then, they had a lot of smaller rooms. And what was really intriguing is the bedrooms were maybe 16-foot squares for international leaders. Each one had a giant floor-to-ceiling window looking out to the golf course. They weren’t ostentatious and plush; they were basic. They did that on purpose just to make sure that there were human-scale rooms in the home that allowed people to be themselves and bring them back down to earth. We took that idea.

The kitchen, family room, and bedrooms are human-scaled rooms. The rest of the house is big and a little frightening for the family—and they talk about that in the film. They say it’s too much for them. 

There’s a key point in the movie where there is a very, very intimate moment in the largest room in the house, and it puts a spin on everything we worked toward in the story. The house really does take on a life of its own.

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