One side of California architect Wallace Neff's practice was designing mansions for Hollywood A-listers like Groucho Marx and Judy Garland. Another was was designing wildly innovative houses. One such home is for sale right now in Pasadena, California for $1.95 million, the last of eight 'Airform' houses. Neff designed this two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in 1946 for his brother Andrew.
As a sideline to his tony mansion-crafting work Neff (1895-1982) conducted a number of experiments starting in 1932 with what were known as 'balloon' houses. What is that? Well, in this case, industrial-strength neoprene nylon was inflated to a desired dimension and then topped with Gunite, a type of concrete sprayed from a hose. Add a layer of insulation and another layer of concrete and you’d have an Airform house. They could be completed in as few as 48 hours.
Gunite enables easier curves than casting or pouring concrete does and is most commonly used in swimming pools. A number of architects made use of it, from Richard Neutra to Jacques Couëlle and John Covert Watson. In the case of Neff's Pasadena house, city officials were unsure it would hold up; Neff found a Caltech professor to vouch for its stability, and it stands as a futuristic presence still today.
The dome makes for a dazzling interior, 12 feet high at its apex with partitions for the two bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. Neff observed in Architectural Forum in 1946, 'The absolute absence of girders, columns and jigsaw trusses startles the imagination.' The rooms are about half of the slices of this circle, rotating around a remarkable cantilevered chimney.
The owners, Priya Girishankar, head of marketing at WEBTOON, and Damon Cleckler, a Carvana product executive, were well familiar with the 1,204 sq ft house from two decades of visiting a friend there who died in 2023. Clecker observed, 'The moment you walked into the home, you knew how incredible and special it was. It blew our minds.'
They suffered another loss of their own when their Gregory Ain house was destroyed in the 2025 Eaton fires. Girishankar noted that this work was 'our path forward after losing the Ain house. The decision to buy and restore the Neff bubble was a labour of love. It allowed us to bring back the house to a place that we hope and believe Neff envisioned when he built it.'
The house required a little work, with electrical, heating, air, and plumbing updates, as well as concrete repairs. Their most consequential restorative act was healing a decades-old dent from an HVAC unit. With technological advances it was now possible to remove these and utilize a ducted mini-split. Cleckler explained, 'This would allow for the shell to return to it's original glory as a standalone unit, unencumbered by the steampunk-like barnacles of big aluminum tubes, conduit and metal boxes.'
The property sits on a 9,000 sq ft lot and also contains a 1,000 sq ft detached studio space with its own living area, bathroom and bedroom. Fifteen feet beneath that is another atomic era surprise: an Airform bomb shelter.
Cleckler explained, 'It's not showy. It's not a statement. It's a type of solution that came with affordances not typically found in a rectilinear box. It's more organic than organic architecture, and therefore it has a kind of unusual purity to it.'