1242 W Oceanfront Newport Beach, CA 92661

The Philip and Leah Lovell Beach House, R.M. Schindler (1926). One of the defining masterpieces of early California modernism, offered for the first time on the centenary of its completion. Widely recognized as Schindler's second most important work (Steele, 2005), the Lovell Beach House has served for the last 100 years as the Lovell familys personal oceanfront retreat. Now it seeks a steward who can enjoy and enrich the playful mood of beach life that Schindler sought to conjure up. When client and architect met in the early 1920s, Dr. Philip Lovell was a prominent naturopath; Schindler, born in Vienna, had come to Southern California to supervise Frank Lloyd Wrights projects in the region. For the young architect, Lovells corner lot on Balboa Peninsula would become a laboratory of radical innovation. Inspired by the pile structure indigenous to all beaches, Schindler lifted the house above the shore on five reinforced-concrete frames, each cast in the shape of a squared figure eight. The idea was to assure an unobstructed outlook to the ocean, he wrote, with enough privacy for an informal life behind open windows. Both windows and walls hang on steel rods from Schindlers concrete skeleton. From street level with its garage, its enclosed studio and its garden facing the surf two stairways rise toward the heart of the house: a double-height living and dining room fronted by floor-to-ceiling glass, its volume bisected by a cantilevered balcony running the length of the space. Four bedrooms open off the suspended balcony, boasting views of sea and sand. Throughout, expansi