May 15, 2008 9:32

Kaufmann House Update

I spent two days earlier this week blogging about the pending sale by Christie's of Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs. But the news on Tuesday morning of Robert Rauschenberg's death overshadowed for me the outcome of the auction that night. So let's back up. For the record, the house sold for $15 million — $16.84 million with the purchase premium — the bottom of its $15 to $25 million pre-sale estimate.

Christie's wouldn't identify the buyer, but Carol Vogel in yesterday's New York Times tells us that he or she also "exercised an option to purchase an orchard adjacent to the property for an additional $2.1 million that includes three cacti that were a present from Frank Lloyd Wright to Mr. Kaufmann on his first visit to the home."

I had to laugh when I was reminded about the cactus. I wondered if these were part of the "scores of cholla cacti" trucked in from Wright's compound at Taliesin West that Franklin Toker mentions in his book Fallingwater Rising. (Toker says Edgar J. Kaufmann, who had commissioned the house, "wheedled" them out of Wright.) Whether they are or not, I find it hard to think of them as house warming gifts. Wright had been furious that Kaufmann, who had commissioned him to design Fallingwater in the 1930s, didn't also give him the Palm Springs job. Worse, Kaufmann had turned to Neutra, who had worked briefly for Wright in the 1920s. By the '40s Wright considered Neutra an apostate for adopting the astringent lines of bare bones Modernism, a style Wright detested but which was rapidly making his own work look dated. He even felt that Kaufmann had chosen Neutra deliberately to hurt him.

In which case, for a prickly character like Wright, maybe cactus was the perfect house warming gift after all — at least for a house that he couldn't stand.