Frank Gehry is renowned for crafting visionary, boundary-pushing buildings across the globe — but his own two personal homes are often overlooked, even though they reveal his bravest architectural experiments.
The late, influential architect passed away at 96 last week, at his Santa Monica, California residence, after a brief respiratory illness. A Pritzker Prize laureate, Gehry leaves behind a legacy of bold, artful forms that redefined modern architecture for generations.
Even before Gehry reached worldwide fame through landmarks like the Guggenheim Gallery in the Basque Country, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, or 8 Spruce Street in New York, he began with a more intimate project — a 1920s bungalow in Santa Monica that served as his home.
That well-known residence, recently explored by the New York Times, is simply called the Gehry Residence.
In 1977, Gehry and his wife, Berta Gehry, purchased the Dutch Colonial Revival for just $160,000 — roughly $846,000 in today’s dollars. He later reflected on the home’s modest pink facade to the Times, describing it as a “sweet little house that everyone in the neighborhood liked.”
With a modest initial budget of $50,000 (about $264,500 today) and a readiness to ruffle neighbors, Gehry transformed the dwelling into a landmark of deconstructivist design.
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Paul Goldberger, who wrote Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, explained to The Post that the 1977 house served as Gehry’s international coming-out party.
“It was his laboratory for testing many of his ideas — his fascination with raw industrial materials such as plywood, corrugated metal, and chain-link fencing — and his goal to shape them into a complex, emotionally engaging experience that those materials don’t usually convey,” Goldberger noted via email.
Over the years, Gehry added a shell-like envelope around the original home, gradually producing a composition that combined unexpected materials like chain-link fencing and timber framing. Tilted glass volumes flooded the interiors with light, creating a continually shifting interior atmosphere.
“The aim was to envelop the old house without destroying it, so that old and new could speak to one another,” Goldberger said.
The final look, described by the Los Angeles Conservancy as giving a “sense of perpetual construction,” became the defining essence of the Gehry Residence.
The project wasn’t universally loved. Gehry recalled in 2021 that some neighbors were furious, with one even pursuing legal action against him.
Yet Gehry’s audacity and originality remained undeniable.
As his international profile grew, Gehry’s personal work evolved in tandem with his public projects. His second Los Angeles residence stood as a testament to decades of ongoing experimentation.
At age 90, with his son Samuel Gehry joining in as co-architect, Gehry built another dream home on a hillside overlooking Santa Monica Canyon and the Pacific Ocean. This project, like its predecessor, showcased the same signature moves — unexpected angles, expansive glass, and sculptural forms — but with a far larger budget, replacing plywood with Douglas fir.
Gehry spoke to Architectural Digest in 2019 about this late-in-life commission as a “once-in-a-lifetime” house, a deeply personal capstone to his career.
Both Gehry residences remain in the Gehry family’s hands, continuing to stand as intimate chapters in a career defined by bold experimentation and fearless reinvention.
