The last surviving Wallace Neff Airform home in the United States just hit the market in Pasadena, California for a hair under $2 million. Unsurprisingly, as it is an architectural prize, it’s already active under contract—which means you can still submit backup offers but a deal is in-motion.
Neff, who also designed homes for stars like Judy Garland and Charlie Chaplin, came to the idea for this unique design in 1946 from the soap bubbles he saw while shaving. He built the first one for his brother, Andrew, and saw it as an experimental solution to the postwar housing crisis. Its unconventional, affordable construction method was a deliberate departure from tradition. Built by inflating a giant balloon, layering it in steel mesh, and spraying it with gunite concrete before deflating the form, the structure was as ingenious as it was polarizing.
Neff saw these innovative, cost-effective “Bubbles Houses” as his social responsibility and wanted to build thousands. While he didn’t accomplish that, the ones he did build have all been demolished now. All but this one, The Shell House, which the famed architect actually lived in himself.
Its arrival in Pasadena in 1947 was met with disapproval, though time has a way of reframing the radical as remarkable. Today, the home reads less as an anomaly and more as an ahead-of-its-time vision, even qualifying as a potential Mills Act candidate.
Inside the monolithic residence, the floor plan centers on a circular half living room with a fireplace and a cantilevered chimney. As Neff wrote in the Architectural Forum in 1946, the design’s “absolute absence of girders, columns and jigsaw trusses startles the imagination.” The rooms are half-moon-shaped slices of the whole.
The historic home, a fusion of futuristic engineering with sculptural design, represents multiple chapters in American architectural history. A subsequent owner added an underground bunker during the Cold War, large enough to fit a family of five, according to the listing. Before the current sellers got their hands on it, visual artists Steve Roden and his wife, Sari Takahashi-Roden, owned the home, lovingly restoring it and adding a 1,000-square-foot detached art studio for their practice. This building includes an additional living area, dining room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Then Priya Girishanker and Damon Cleckler took the reins, leading a recent restoration that kept all the quirky elements while updating it for modern comfort, according to Robb Report.
While Neff designed palatial period mansions for Hollywood icons, none were quite as daring as this. George Penner of Compass holds the special listing.
