The 2,553-square-foot home has four bedrooms and four bathrooms.

By Alyssa Abkowitz
Excerpted from the Wall Street Journal

The Phoenix home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his son, David, which faced demolition earlier this fall, has sold for $2.38 million.

Listed for $2.52 million, the 2,553-square-foot home with four bedrooms and four bathrooms was built in 1952. The circular home, made of concrete, has custom cabinetry, furniture made from mahogany from the Philippines and spiral-designed elements that Mr. Wright repeated in the Guggenheim Museum.

Local developer 8081 Meridian bought the home in June from David Wright’s granddaughters. According to local news reports, the city of Phoenix granted a demolition permit to the developer, which allowed the permit to expire after protests and instead decided to try to find a buyer for the property.

The buyer’s agent Robert Hassett says the buyer wishes to remain anonymous but called him a Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast. Listing agent Robert Joffe says the buyer was the first person he showed the home to. Mr. Hassett says the buyer plans to spend about two years restoring the property and will work with the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy on the project. He estimated that the buyer will spend $2 million to $2.5 million on the restoration.

STATS: A 1,760-square-foot home with two bedrooms and two bathrooms on a lot that is just under 1 acre is asking $2.5 million. Property taxes in 2011 were $2,749, based on the original owners’ assessed value, but would go up to 1% of the assessed value of the home when it is sold, usually equal to the purchase price.

DETAILS: Known as the Berger home, this house was built in the 1950s from a design by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Robert Berger paid $15,000 for the design and then built the house himself, living in a rental down the street with his family while he built it in his spare time. One of his sons wrote to Mr. Wright and asked him to design a doghouse, which the architect did at no cost. Mr. Wright also designed furniture for the house. It is a classic Wright Usonian house, meant for middle-class families, with large stone walls, radiant heat and concrete floors, natural wood throughout and a large central fireplace. The house remained with the original owners, Robert and Gloria, who are deceased, and is now owned in a trust by their four children.

SELLERS: The house is being sold by the trust that Gloria Berger left her children when she died in 2011.

Click here to read the entire article.  

From Associated Press, February 9, 2012

Paintings, jewelry and fashions belonging to the late Elizabeth Taylor have sold for more than $183 million, with all of the more than 1,800 items on offer snapped up, Christie’s auction house said Thursday.

Christie’s said 1,817 lots were sold at a series of auctions in New York and London, some at 50 times their pre-sale estimates.

The most expensive was Vincent van Gogh’s landscape “Vue de l’asile et de la Chapelle de Remy,” which once hung in the living room of Taylor’s Bel Air home. It sold for 10.1 million pounds ($16 million), including the buyer’s premium.  The daughter of a London art dealer, Taylor amassed a substantial collection of 19th and 20th century art, including works by Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir.  Read more here. 

Biff Henrich/Martin House Restoration Corp

By Eve M. Kahn, Published in The New York Times on July 7, 2011

Darwin D. Martin, a soap-factory executive in Buffalo, was a serial client of Frank Lloyd Wright. Between 1903 and 1928, the charismatic architect designed a half-dozen buildings for Martin’s family, including a carriage house and a mausoleum. Wright referred to his shy, bookish patron as “my best friend,” borrowed $70,000 from him over the years and never repaid the loans.

By the 1930s the Martins were largely broke, and they had to abandon their sprawling main house on a leafy side street. About half of its 394 windows, with stained-glass squares and polygons in iridescent golds and greens, were removed; they have been scattered across private collections and museums or are presumed lost.

The property, now a museum called the Martin House Complex, has been undergoing tens of millions of dollars in restoration, including replication of missing windows. A few original panes have turned up: this spring William Clarkson, a retired printing-company executive in Buffalo, and his wife, Nan, gave back a grid-pattern window from the brick carriage house.

Click here to read the entire article.

Diane Keaton still maintains a busy schedule as an actress, but in recent years the Oscar-winner has devoted considerable time to another area of interest: architecture and design. A serial house flipper, Ms. Keaton, 65, has bought several homes in her native Southern California and painstakingly renovated them before getting the itch to move on and repeat the process. The actress is also actively involved in architectural preservation (she is on the board of the Los Angeles Conservancy), and in 2007, she co-wrote “California Romantica” (Rizzoli), a book celebrating the Spanish and Mission-style architecture she loves.

Now Ms. Keaton is getting into the design game herself, with a tabletop collection called K by Keaton that she created for Bed, Bath & Beyond. The stoneware cups, bowls and plates, which are available online and in some stores now, have her trademark whimsy (some are stamped with the words “eat” or “bite”) and lack of pretension (prices start at about $5). But they also reflect Ms. Keaton’s latest obsession: the heartland. The “farm-y, landscape colors” she used, she told a reporter, were inspired by wheat, grass and bark.

Why did you decide to partner with Bed, Bath & Beyond?

Well, they were interested. Which is also pretty remarkable. As you know, I’m more of an entertainment person, but I have a real passion for design. It means a lot to me to have the opportunity to even try this.

Is the dishware inspired by anything in your own life?

I have a daughter who’s 15 and a son who’s 10. My life is such that I have these old dishes that I eat off with my kids. I’ve broken them, and all that.

What’s come of all this is I like sturdy. I want something I feel will last and has some weight to it and is very simple. Like, for example, I don’t understand why we don’t eat more food out of bowls. I could eat all of my meals out of bowls.

Click here to read the entire article.

The Andrew B. & Maude Cooke House, a "hemicycle" beach house in Virginia Beach, Va., is one of 17 Frank Lloyd Wright designs currently on the market featured on SaveWright.org.

By Mary Umberger, Published in Inman News, June 6, 2011

The work of Frank Lloyd Wright tends to inspire almost slavish devotion from his admirers, many of whom undoubtedly dream of owning a home designed by the iconic architect.

Turns out, opportunities to buy Wright-designed homes are more plentiful than one might think, according to Janet Halstead, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago, a nonprofit that works to protect his designs from demolition.

One way to achieve that goal is to help sellers of Wright properties find buyers who will appreciate them and maintain and restore them, Halstead said.  Toward that end, the conservancy has developed a service to help owners and their real estate agents market the properties through a page on its Web site,SaveWright.org.

At the moment, the conservancy’s “Wright on the Market” page has 17 Wright-designed properties listed (including one gasoline station). Read the entire article here.

A Kahana home previously listed for $15.9 million will be sold at what’s believed to be Maui’s first super-luxury real estate auction on May 12.  Yes, $15.9 million.  It’s something average Mauians could never afford – and may not even have imagined existed in their own backyard.

Island Realtors said the price is actually not unusual, but some who have toured the “Jewel of Kahana” say it’s one of the more spectacular properties they’ve seen on an island with no shortage of opulent homes. The house has more than 275 feet of lineal oceanfront views, eight oceanfront master suites and an open-air living area with ground-to-ceiling views of the Pacific.  The 9,800-square-foot Kahana home can accommodate up to 16 guests and comes fully furnished with top-of-the-line custom wood cabinetry and stone features, flat-screen televisions, vessel sinks that resemble seashells, and fixtures and furnishings that wouldn’t be out of place at a five-star hotel. The main house and ohana are connected under the same roof. Beach access is right next door. The only thing not included in the sale is the artwork.

Fitch brought on Concierge Auctions to handle the sale after she was impressed by the company’s success on the Big Island and Kauai.  It was Concierge that sold Cher’s Hualalai Resort home at auction in January for a winning bid of $8.72 million, said Laura Brady, Concierge’s vice president of marketing.  Fitch said that she worked with Concierge for several months to determine which property would be appropriate for this type of auction, noting that Concierge had the resources to find potential buyers that she would not be able to reach on her own.  Concierge is suggesting $7.5 million as the opening bid.  “This is not a suggestion of the home’s value, but rather a point that we feel all bidders should be prepared to begin their bidding,” Brady said in a later email. “The ultimate sale price is not up to us or the seller, but rather to the bidders.”

The tower at 8 Spruce Street in lower Manhattan which was completed in February 2011 has a titanium and glass exterior and is 76 stories high.

8 Spruce Street, a 76 story residential apartment building in New York City designed by Frank Gerhy has officially opened.  The Wall Street Journal recently sat down with Gerhy to talk about that project and his thoughts on life.  These are excerpts from the interview which was published April 2, 2011.  Read the entire article HERE.

The best advice I’ve received is to be yourself. The best artists do that. People look over their shoulders too much. I tell kids that come to Yale, where I’ve taught every other year since 1978, to find your own way because then you’re the only expert. Some people might not like what you do, but still, you’re the only expert.

One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The first time I saw his sculpture of Saint Teresa [in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome] was in 1960. You can only see it during Mass and in order to see the little chapel it’s in, you have to get to the front pew and lean forward. I don’t know how to do the crossing myself very well. The young priest was howling with laughter when he saw me in the front row, trying to kneel when everyone else kneels, but doing it wrong.

I’ve always been fascinated with folds. All artists through the ages have spent time on the fold. Michelangelo had stacks of drawings of fabric. At 8 Spruce, we’re using Bernini’s folds to inspire the façade. I look for ways to express feeling in a building without using historic decoration.

If I think of my greatest achievement, it’s like a love affair: You’re always excited about the building you’re working on. So right now it’s 8 Spruce St., but next month it will be something else.

The next building I’m working on is the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. They’re pouring the foundations right now.

At any given moment, I’m working on 20 projects, in stages ranging from conceptual to construction.

I can’t retire. I’m 82. It’s too young.

—Edited from an interview by Jackie Cooperman

Auctions are bringing buyers and sellers in the area together at a time when economic conditions make selling real estate in the traditional method a challenge.

Walter House of House Auction Company headquartered in Carteret County, said that more people have turned to auctions with the slowdown in the traditional market but there’s good reason people find the auction method a desirable one regardless of the market conditions.

“Auction creates a competition among buyers that no other method of selling duplicates,” said House, chief auctioneer and broker in charge for the auction company. “They like it because it’s timely and it’s accelerated marketing to a large target market area.”

Auction day, he said, is only one piece of the process that includes extensive marketing and advertising of the property before bidding ever begins.  House has been involved in all types of auctions, including a 2009 auction hosted by the Onslow County Sheriff’s Office that was the largest auction of unclaimed property in the county’s history. But real estate auctions are his specialty; and he’s had clients turn to auction to sell property of all types, from single homes and waterfront lots to farmland, commercial property and old school property offered up by Carteret County.  Click here to read the entire article.

“I’m not sure it’s at all your thing,” Alan Orenbuch remembers the real estate broker saying. “It’s modern, and pretty strange.”

But after a year of negotiations with the owner of a Victorian farmhouse in Millbrook, N.Y., failed to result in a sale, Mr. Orenbuch, an architect, and his partner, Bryan O’Rourke, an interior designer, were ready for something different.

The strange house, which had just come on the market, turned out to be a modernist gem known as the Plastic Tent House, designed in 1974 by the architect John M. Johansen, as his own residence.

Mr. Johansen, now 94, was a member of the Harvard Five, a group of young modernists associated with Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the postwar years. These architects, who included Philip Johnson and Marcel Breuer, built a number of experimental homes that helped reinvent American domestic architecture, many of them in New Canaan, Conn.

The Plastic Tent, one of five so-called Symbolic Houses Mr. Johansen designed between the late 1950s and the 1970s, represented a departure from the modernism practiced by his colleagues. Drawing on the work of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, he incorporated elements symbolizing the various stages of life — cavelike rooms, bridges, towers, trees — into these houses, taking his work in a new direction. Click here to read the entire article.