Sea Ranch Master Planner Lawrence Halprin’s Cliff-Hugging Residence Lists for $8M

Arguably the most acclaimed landscape architect of the 20th century, the late Lawrence Halprin created the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. and the Keller Fountain Park in Portland, Oregon, which was called "possibly the most important urban space since the Renaissance" by New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable.

Halprin’s most famous and resonant design, however, may be the master plan for Sea Ranch, a residential community along the California coast about 100 miles north of San Francisco. In the ’60s, drawing from his early years spent on an Israeli kibbutz, he imagined an idyllic development for people to "inhabit this land and protect the awesome character without softening or altering it." Admirers of Sea Ranch will be interested to hear that Halprin’s own residence has been listed by his estate for $8,000,000.

The Halprin residence sits on 5.1 oceanfront acres. Originally built in 1966, the family home was a modest cabin designed by Charles Moore, and in 1979 there came along a detached studio—but in 2001, the house burned down. It was replaced two years later by the current building designed by Buzz Yudell, a longtime colleague of Moore’s. Nearly identical to the first home, the two-bed, two-bath, 2,123-square-foot residence makes use of even higher-quality materials.