Rudolph Schindler’s Lovell Beach House Just Listed for $18.8M

Location: 1242 W Oceanfront, Newport Beach, California

Price: $18,800,000

Architect: Rudolph M. Schindler

Year: 1926

Footprint: 2,741 square feet (4 beds, 4 baths)

From the Listing: "Revered as ‘an icon of modernity at a Promethean scale,’ the Lovell Beach House has served for the last 100 years as the Lovell family’s personal oceanfront retreat. Widely recognized as "Schindler’s second most important work," after the home he built for himself on Kings Road, the house now seeks a steward who can enjoy and enrich the ‘playful mood of beach life’ that Schindler sought to conjure up. When client and architect met in the early 1920s, Dr. Philip Lovell was a prominent naturopath with a health column in the Los Angeles Times. Schindler, born in Vienna, had come to Southern California to supervise Frank Lloyd Wright’s projects in the region. For the young, pioneering architect, Lovell’s corner lot on Balboa Peninsula would become a laboratory of radical innovation. His vision is miraculously intact today. Inspired by the ‘pile structure indigenous to all beaches,’ Schindler lifted the house above the shore on five reinforced-concrete frames, each cast in the shape of a squared figure eight. The idea was ‘to assure an unobstructed outlook to the ocean,’ he wrote, with enough privacy for ‘an informal life behind open windows.’ Both windows and walls hang on steel rods from the concrete skeleton. From street level, two stairways rise toward the heart of the house: a luminous, double-height living and dining room fronted by floor-to-ceiling glass, its volume bisected by a cantilevered balcony running the length of the space. Four bedrooms open off the suspended balcony, with panoramic views of sea and sand."