Unique Listing—with History
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two-house estate that hit the Southern California market recently. Photos: courtesy Stephen Sigoloff |
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A truly exceptional, two-house estate—which includes Case Study house No. 20 from the legendary postwar program—hit the market recently, located in what could arguably be called the birthplace of West Coast modernism.
"When you think about the location of four significant homes [in the area], it's pretty cool," says Stephen Sigoloff, one of two listing agents for the estate owned by one of TV's most successful writer-producers. "I marvel that you've got a house like this, with all that land around it."
Listed at $18 million, the 1.3-acre estate, at 14800 Corona Del Mar in the Santa Monica Canyon neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, belonged to Sam Simon, co-creator of 'The Simpsons' among other television successes. Also a potent and high-profile boxing manager, poker player, and animal rights advocate, Simon died last March of cancer at age 59. He willed his estate to a trust including animal welfare charity.
Simon was also an admirer of great architecture, which is undoubtedly why he purchased a home in the Santa Monica Canyon.
When Sigoloff references "four significant homes," he is not even including the innovative, Gold LEED-certified main house that Simon had built on the same property in 2010 after earthquake damage and a fire destroyed his prior home there in 2007. That's because this unusual listing also includes the Stuart Bailey House, one of four Case Study houses on Chautauqua Boulevard, the only street in the historic program with more than one.
Twenty-four homes were built between 1945 and 1964 in Art and Architecture magazine's groundbreaking Case Study House program. Four of the 36 Case Study designs were by Richard Neutra, prince of the mid-century modernist architects, but of the four, only the Bailey House (1948) at 219 Chautauqua was ever constructed.
All four Case Study houses on Chautauqua Boulevard were built in the late 1940s: No. 8, the Eames House; No. 9, the Entenza House, No. 18A, the West House; and No. 20A, the Bailey House. (Some numbers were used for more than one house, so letters were added to those.) Another famed modernist, Charles Eames, helped design both 8 and 9 and lived in the former.
