Get ready, Strait Lane, and look your best. On Wednesday afternoon, a select group of top Dallas real estate agents will glide through the renovated Philip Johnson home at 10210 Strait Ln. It has just hit the market for $27.5 million, and David Nichols of Allie Beth Allman’s Mathews-Nichols Group has the listing.
You know this house: It’s the distinctive white contemporary with arches on the east side of Strait Lane, closer to Walnut Hill Lane. The New York Times called the home “almost campy” and said it was the “the most strangely fascinating thing” Johnson ever created.
Alan Peppard, who broke the story of the sale Sunday, says the home has hosted President Barack Obama not once, but twice. That’s probably because the owners, Naomi Aberly and Larry Lebowitz, have been huge fundraisers for the Obama campaign. But they also are major arts patrons and, as such, saved the home from the ravages of time, age and nature.
A little history: In 1963, Dallas construction titan Henry C. Beck Jr. and then-wife, Patty (daughter of Wirt Davis), commissioned Johnson to build what would be the only Philip Johnson-designed structure in Dallas. The Cleveland-born Johnson is known for his postmodern work since the 1980s and also for founding the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Johnson is largely considered one of the most influential American architects. The home at 10210 Strait Ln., which sits on 6.45 acres, is 12,000 square feet, a Texas-sized luxury version of the lake pavilion Johnson designed for his well-known New Canaan, Connecticut masterpiece, the Glass House.
In 2002, Patty sold the house following her divorce from Beck, and Dave Perry-Miller handled the transaction. The house was perhaps a bit tired. The buyers spent six years painstakingly restoring and modernizing it.
This included a total redo of the 6.45 acres by Massachusetts firm Reed Hilderbrand. Dallas’ Bodron+Fruit did the interiors and designed the pavilion for the new swimming pool. Local designer Joshua Rice even tells me he lived at the home for a period of time during the renovation.
The home has five bedrooms, eight full and three half-baths, formals, study, pool, and guest house pavilion. Curbed questions if the nearly $30 million price tag is a tad ambitious despite the six-year renovation:
The renovation architects ‘fell prey to its outsize charms and managed to make what could have been monumental and chilly into something that is as comfortable as it is glamorous,’ according to the Times, which seems to ring pretty true, and is certainly better than the recent fate of another Johnson-designed oddity. Will a buyer fall as well, for almost $30M?
Looks like the Dallas County Appraisal District needs to do its homework: 10210 Strait Ln. is on the DCAD books for $10,752,400. Whoa, that’s quite a difference from $27.5 mil, no?
The owners are arts patrons and Obama fundraisers.
