GRAPHĒ: L.A.’s Famous Stahl House Should Belong to You

We do a disservice to modernist homes—and the public—when they are priced as private portfolio pieces for the rich.

As any regular reader of this publication is likely aware, there is a robust economy for modernist houses by significant architects. The most recent home to come to market is the iconic Stahl House for $25 million, designed by Pierre Koenig in the late 1950s as part of the well-known Case Study Houses, which advocated for mass-produced, affordable housing in the postwar period. Like many modernist houses, the Stahl House’s quiet story as an affordable and experimental model home for the postwar working class has bifurcated from its current, very audible, very unaffordable sale price.

From a real estate perspective, the price of the Stahl House is reasonable in comparison to recent historic house listings, such as the Ennis-Brown House by Frank Lloyd Wright asking $23 million (it sold for $18 million), or that of the Brown House by Richard Neutra, once owned by designer Tom Ford and after, writer and producer Ryan Murphy, who recently listed it at $33.9 million (it went for $24 million in September of 2025). These sales make the $8.75 million sale of Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House to the Wirths (of Hauser-Wirth notoriety) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Freeman House sale at a reported $1.8 million seem almost affordable. Like much of Los Angeles’s speculative real estate market, the prices of significant architecture are not established by rational means but by irrational notions of celebrity and desirability; these houses and their association with a particular mode of artful living drive up their prices, transforming previously humble family homes into coveted and rarefied assets. Historical value does not correlate with market value, but the bibliographic length of a house well published doesn’t hurt.

With the listing of the Stahl House, Bruce Stahl and Shari Stahl-Gronwald, the children of the original owners, are purportedly searching for an institution or individual who promises to preserve the house, as they have for the past six decades using much of their own resources (much applauded). The question is not if the house will sell—the question is to whom? By its price point, private ownership is inevitable. There is no public institution or nonprofit organization capable of acquiring it for this amount, so the asking price sets the terms of ownership: an individual buyer, likely a billionaire, of which Los Angeles has plenty. The high asking price all but guarantees the Stahl House will remain private, raising the question of whether and how critical public access to the house will be continued. (The Stahl family has not responded to request for comment.)