A rare Paul Rudolph house is up for sale in Los Angeles – and A$AP Rocky has designed the interiors

Basic.Space.LA returns to Los Angeles for an invitation-only shopping experience through 29 March with a variety of things one might find at a curated design event. There’s also one thing you normally won’t: a full Paul Rudolph house for sale.

Rudolph’s Walker Guest House was constructed in 1952 on Sanibel Island in Florida and remained there until 2019, when it was purchased by art collector Peter Galliaert. The house was moved to Yucca Valley, California where it’s remained in storage until this rare appearance.

Basic.Space offered an exceptional centerpiece to its first iteration last year, a Jean Prouvé gas station shipped from France. Jesse Lee, founder of Basic.Space, explained, 'When we were planning for year two, we wanted something that couldn’t be less impressive than last year.' He recalls meeting with Galliaert and telling him, ‘I would love to showcase this and possibly sell it.’

Upon receiving Galliaert’s blessing, the 650 sq ft home, made primarily of plywood, was essentially cut in half, put into shipping containers and reassembled on a plaza outside of the Pacific Design Center. The home can be yours for $2 million.

The Walker Guest house was an early landmark in Rudolph’s career, an exemplar of his crisp but airy Florida work before he turned to complex concrete in northern climates. The house has often been leagued with Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth and Philip Johnson’s Glass houses . It is rigorously geometric and yet more adaptable and eccentric than either. Its wooden exoskeleton (doubled to look like steel profiles, but actually humble wood) blurs the boundaries between inside and out while also providing a frame for full-window length wooden shutters, which can be raised to provide four ad hoc porticos, or lowered to offer privacy. Highly nautical 35 kg cast ‘cannonballs; serve as counterweight to each of those shutters.

Architects Raha Talebi and Paul Vantieghem were enlisted to plot out the reassembly and rehabilitation of the house for the temporary installation. As Talebi explains, 'Our task was really to make sure it’s as well aligned as it was in 1953 even for the temporary install.' Some of their remediation is designed to last; they noticed that the cannonballs had contributed to slight buckling of the outrigger beams so they integrated steel plates to mitigate this.

They didn’t paint the wood connecting the two halves, a slight nod to the fact that the house is only temporarily being reassembled here. Most interventions were designed to be faithful to the original: ‘The one thing that we could do to inherit qualities from its position in Florida is to just respect the orientation. So it’s placed at the Pacific Design Center in exactly the way it was in Florida,’ Vantieghem explains.

There is also a more unusual consultant on the project: A$AP Rocky. The rapper, producer and founder of the interior design studio HOMMEMADE is providing additional decor to the house, adding, as Lee explained ‘contemporary flair while respecting the historic interior.’ These pieces include a Memphis Carlton bookcase, a Pesce dining chair set, and a Kris Van Assche bronze. It’s part of broader effort to mix up various ages and types of design around the house, from classic cars staged by LÁrt de l'automobile around the house to contemporary streetwear, musical instruments, classic and new furniture, and much else.

It’s an unlikely setting for a Rudolph house, one which casts not just it, but everything around it in a different light. Lee explained, ‘If you’re a die-hard Paul Rudolph fan you might be following this but 99 percent of people coming to this might have never seen a Paul Rudolph House. It’s all about contextualizing among other things we have.’