Houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright are definitely covetable, but they can also be money pits, especially the ones in Los Angeles, which are largely made out of concrete. (The city of LA just spent years fixing up the public Hollyhock House, for instance.) So a well-kept one is a find and the John B. Storer House in the Hollywood Hills, "widely considered the best-preserved Wright building in Los Angeles," according to a 2005 New York Times story, has just fetched the highest sale price on record for an FLW: $6.8 million. The Storer was in sad shape back in 1984, however, when Die Hard and Sherlock Holmes producer Joel Silver bought it for just $800,000. Silver spent years carefully restoring the house before listing it in 2000, and he and real estate agent Crosby Doe were careful about its sale too. Silver sold in 2002 to "an architecture-loving couple with Microsoft ties." They put it up for sale in 2013, and it just finally sold last month.
The new buyer has a company that preserves architecture and who "is an architect himself," says Doe, who repped the seller this time around, as well as the buyer. He adds that while the home is "livable," there is always work to be done on a property like this, and the new buyer is interested in continuing to restore the showpiece.
Built in 1923 for Storer, a homeopathic physician, the Mayan-inspired house is one of a handful of FLW houses in LA made out of patterned concrete blocks, but is unique in that its blocks feature four different patterns. FLW's three other LA-area houses of this style (La Miniatura/the Millard House in Pasadena; the Freeman House, also in the Hollywood Hills; and the Ennis House in Los Feliz) only feature single-pattern blocks. Take a look:
· Frank Lloyd Wright's Storer House Finally Finds a Buyer [Curbed]
· Frank Lloyd Wright's Storer House Hits the Market in the Hills [Curbed LA]
· Storer House [Crosby Doe]
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