One of America’s most famous mid-century modern homes asks $2M — and it can be shipped to you
New York Post
Valerie Kellogg - February 12, 2025
The Walker Guesthouse, currently in storage, now seeks a new generation of owners to bring it back to its intended glory.
Courtesy of The Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture
One of the most iconic tiny homes ever built in America can be yours for $2 million — but you’ll need a place to put it if you want to live inside.
Now wrapped in heavy-duty industrial plastic in two parts, the mid-century Walker Guesthouse is ready to be shipped from California to a buyer in the United States or overseas, said listing agent Chris Pomeroy of Brown Harris Stevens.
The cost of shipping is not included in the asking price, Pomeroy said.
Architect Paul Rudolph designed the innovative 24-by-24-foot cube structure, which was built in 1953 on Sanibel Island, Florida, and is currently being featured in a New York City art show. The home stayed within the same family until 2019, when it sold in a Sotheby’s auction for $750,000 to an undisclosed purchaser near Palm Springs — itself a hotbed of mid-century architecture — who wanted to see it preserved. It has been in storage ever since, Pomeroy said.
“It’s a work of architectural art,” said Pomeroy, who has visited the disassembled structure and walked inside its sections. “If someone wanted to turn it into a livable structure, they would probably go through whatever their local permitting would ask them to do.”
Through a system of shutters, pulleys and cannonball-like weights, the cottage can be transformed into an open-air pavilion that can block sunlight, bring in ocean breezes and connect those inside with nature.
The house is being sold with period furniture that Rudolph, who died in 1997, designed or chose for the interior, including a desk, a coffee table, director’s chairs and a bookshelf — along with his original plans and architectural drawings.
Seven original round weights, painted in a distinctive red and popularly referred to as cannonballs, also come with the house, according to Pomeroy. They are said to weigh 77 pounds each, said Sean Khorsandi, a volunteer for the Paul Rudolph Foundation in Manhattan, who is working on a book about Rudolph. Articles about the Walker house have said they were made of either iron or cast in concrete from beach balls.
A photograph of the house snapped by celebrated architectural lensman Ezra Stoller is on view at “Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,” which can be seen through March 16 at Gallery 913 at the Met museum on Fifth Avenue. Readers of Architectural Record, the more than a century old magazine, once named the dwelling “one of the most important houses of the 20th century,” according to the exhibition’s catalog.
The Walker Guesthouse includes designated areas for cooking, eating and sleeping, as well as a bathroom and a closet. The stove and sinks are from decades past, and a refrigerator would have to be installed, Pomeroy said. “It was … really a small home before we even knew what that term meant,” he said.
Dr. Walter Walker hired Rudolph to design the house, the architect’s first solo commission. Walker was the grandson of lumber baron T. B. Walker, an art patron behind the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and once considered one of the wealthiest men in America.
“It was a bit of a family folly,” said his stepdaughter Tian Dayton, 74, a Manhattan author and psychologist. “We were all charmed when it became a legend of Rudolph’s. For us, it was a family legend — a sweet, zany and beautiful one. We all loved it in one way or another.”
There were always family members staying at the cottage, often sleeping on makeshift beds fashioned out of parts from a Rudolph-designed sofa, said Dayton, whose son, when small enough, would sometimes use the closet as a makeshift bedroom.
Still, she said, it was elegant. “It was like glamping,” she said.
The house had electricity, and the family brought in portable heaters when they needed to. Opening the flaps brought in fresh sea air that cooled the home, so there was no need for air conditioning, she said. Its uniqueness earned its place on the island as an unofficial local landmark, one resident often came to see and referred to as the “Cannonball House” due to the weights used to raise and lower the panels, she said. It took seven minutes for Dayton and her husband, Brandt, to use the mechanisms to convert the structure from a cozy shelter to a high-style tent. “It was fun,” she said. “We laughed.”
“The charm of living in the Walker Guesthouse with its movable flaps was that you could always adjust to the natural elements of the moment,” said Brandt, 75, a retired art dealer. “If it were raining, you could shut down a flap or two. During the day, you could raise the flaps to let in more breeze or close them down at night to be cozy. You could leave them slightly ajar like a cracked window or you could have them fully up and feel like you were living in an open pavilion.”
After Elaine Walker died in 2018, her four children sold the property, which included a main house on 1.6 acres, according to the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture. The guesthouse’s auction included an exhibit, a lecture and a film about the structure featuring the famed architecture critic Paul Goldberger. The home was taken apart and moved to the West Coast in 2020, the institute’s website says.
Dayton said her stepfather took excellent care of the Walter Guesthouse. “I would just like to see that care continue,” she said. Brandt said a recent hurricane damaged the main house on the former property, and surely would have destroyed the guesthouse. “That’s our only consolation in moving it,” he said.
“I hope that it goes to someone that can enjoy it and preserve it,” said Marina Dayton, 47, Dayton and Brandt’s daughter who is an architect based in upstate New York.
The new owner will likely want to work with an architect and a site manager to reconstruct the home, said Pomeroy.
The perfect buyer will be someone who loves architecture, art and imagination, he said. “It could be an individual,” he added. “It would [also] look right at home in a great cultural institution.”
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