Rudolph Schindler's 1926 Newport Beach House Goes on the Market for US$18.8 Million
The Lovell Beach House, a concrete home designed by the architect Rudolph Schindler, is on the market for US$18.8 million, ArtNews reported. It is the first time the house has been offered for sale.
Philip Lovell hired Schindler to build it in 1926. The house sits on the Balboa Peninsula, a sandy strip of land in Newport Beach, California, at 1242 West Ocean Front. The Lovell family kept it for 100 years before deciding to sell.
The design was unusual from the start. The Wall Street Journal reported that the original plan had no bedrooms at all, and that the layout was considered a failure. Living space was instead placed inside five free-standing concrete frames, cast in square figure-eight shapes, as Archinect describes it.
Two years after the house was finished, in 1928, Schindler closed in the open-air sleeping porches to create ordinary bedrooms. A sleeping porch is a covered outdoor area where people once slept for fresh air. The change gave the house the rooms its layout had lacked.
Today the house has four bedrooms and four bathrooms. It covers 2,741 square feet, roughly 255 square metres. The landscaping was designed by the architect Richard Neutra, another name closely tied to modern architecture in California.
The listing is also a reminder of how a house can change hands within one family for a century and then reach the open market. For buyers, it is a rare chance to see a Schindler building up close, if they can meet the asking price. For the Lovell family, it marks the end of a long period of ownership.
Schindler's work in Southern California is often studied alongside the homes of other modern architects of the period. The Lovell Beach House is one of the best-known examples of that early work, and the sale puts it in front of a new set of owners.
