IM Pei designed only three private houses; the grandest of these, the Westover House in Fort Worth, Texas, is now for sale for the first time.
This seven-bedroom, 13-bathroom 19,333 sq ft house features Pei’s trademark geometries, most notably in its garden room, a sloped atrium reminiscent of volumes found in the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Louvre Pyramid in Paris and many other of the late architect’s most notable buildings.
At a moment when Pei’s Dallas City Hall 30 miles away is at active risk of demolition – topping Preservation Texas’ 2026 list of Texas’s Most Endangered Places – this property is clearly valued quite a lot, with its $22 million price tag.
The house was designed in 1969 for Anne Burnett Tandy, an oil heiress, and her husband Charles Tandy, who built RadioShack into an ubiquitous retail presence. It’s located in Fort Worth’s swank Westover Hills on the same block as Paul Rudolph’s largest residential commission, the Bass House. Pianist Van Cliburn also lived nearby and played the Tandys’ grand.
Pei designed a house suited for sociability and art. He observed in House and Garden in 1970, ‘Mrs. Tandy loves parties and she gives them very often, so she wanted lots of space. She needed a house that would be comfortable for two people — or two or three hundred.’
Pei cited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston as well as Mediterranean and North African houses as inspiration for the home’s enclosed courtyards. The garden room has the largest, featuring a fountain (and for the moment a Frank Stella piece).
Wide galleries link the main segments of the house – one at its center neatly cinches off the private from public areas of the home. The garden room’s sloped roof is also echoed at four other points, in the dining room, living room, primary bedroom and guest sitting room, where slanted skylights covered in a wooden lattice provide considerable illumination.
There was close attention to surfaces inside and out. Walls are poured concrete with an aggregate of rose-quartz granite. Pei searched for a year to find that mine, he said. Fluting was then hand-hammered.
There are other elegant details; the building has no window frames, Pei explained in House and Garden: ‘It was quite a feat inserting large sheets of glass into concrete and took much time and effort. Simplification always takes more time. But not having the intermediary metal window frames also gives the illusion of transparency, so you feel the rooms are open.’
Pei wished to make the house as ‘maintenance-free as possible’ even for those who could easily afford it, choosing, ‘durable, serviceable materials all as permanent as you can find.’ These include white Portuguese marble and Burmese teak floors inside and granite surfaces outside.
The primary suite features a bedroom, sitting area, bathroom, closets and a library containing a fireplace and wet bar. There are two living rooms, two formal dining rooms, three kitchens, two wine cellars, and much else. Some elements have been modernised but the bones of the house remain strikingly original.
The house, listed by Ashley Mooring and Ralph Randall of Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty, sits on nearly four acres containing a greenhouse, putting green, heated pool, garage and carport. It is surrounded by live oaks, which Pei preferred.
Still, Pei thought that only time would allow the home to reach its ideal: ‘We shall have to wait for nature…to make it perfect!’
Clearly, the moment has arrived.