When storied modernist architect Paul Rudolph struck out on his own in the mid-20th century, his first project was a four-room guesthouse for a family in Sanibel, Florida. More than 70 years later, the project, now an icon of Rudolph’s career, is on the market for $2 million — and it’s ready to go anywhere.
Commissioned by Walter Walker, a pathologist and heir to the family fortune of timber mogul TB Walker, Rudolph completed the guesthouse as his first solo project in 1953. Located on the shoreline near the Walker family's main residence, the tightly programmed structure encompasses a living and dining space, a sleeping area, a small kitchen equipped with a stove and fridge, and a bathroom, all used by the family and their visitors over the decades.
The architect, who would become a giant in his field and a Sarasota School leader, arranged the 650-square-foot living space on an eight-foot-by-eight-foot grid, hovering above the sandy ground on a slender steel frame enclosed by a series of white-painted wood flaps. Those flaps operated as gigantic shutters that opened all sides of the residence to the Gulf Coast, transforming the compact property into an open-air pavilion.
“You have beautiful light and these soft ocean breezes coming in, so there was no need for nonsense like air conditioning,” said Walker’s stepdaughter Tian Dayton. The guesthouse “invited you to relax, and it also invited your mind to become simpler … and quiet down to appreciate the breeze and enjoy your peace,” she said.
A series of bright-red cannonballs dangling from the flaps acted as counterweights that made the flaps “go shooting up,” Dayton said, making the design and operation customizable, like a “do-it-yourself box.” Now 74, Dayton is a New York-based psychologist and author.
At the time, the project cost about $16 per square foot, clocking in at $10,465. Today, that’s roughly $124,975.
In 2019, after the passing of Walker’s wife, Elaine, the Walker family listed its main residence on the market, but there was no guarantee that a buyer would preserve the guesthouse. So, the family auctioned it separately with Sotheby’s in New York, ensuring that the project “would be saved in an appropriate way and ultimately have the opportunity to be placed in a different location,” said Brown Harris Stevens broker Chris Pomeroy, the guesthouse’s current listing agent.
The Walker Guesthouse was carefully disassembled into two even parts and sold for $750,000 in December 2019 — $920,00 with auction fees — and shipped to a private buyer in California with plans to purchase land and install the project somewhere. The nearly immediate onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, derailed those plans, and the guesthouse sat in storage, tightly wrapped in “heavy industrial protective plastic,” Pomeroy said. “It’s really like entering a little magic architectural cave at the moment.”
But the listing comes with its challenges: “It’s unusual in that it’s really a work of art at this stage of its life,” Pomeroy said. “So, it’s a work of great architecture, but it functions as a sculpture.” Plus, the guesthouse remains in storage, “so it is not a situation where I can open a door and take someone on a tour.”
Instead, Pomeroy has long discussions with possible buyers, walking them through detailed images and drawings, plus architectural preservation and shipping options, not included in the sale or listing price. “With skill and care, it can be moved to a variety of places,” he said. “So then it’s about figuring out how you would want to use it, what climate it’s going to and how you would take care of it in that climate.”
The project could end up in the hands of a private collector or a cultural institution, ideally a buyer that “will appreciate [the Walker Guesthouse] and understand it,” Dayton said.
As she visited her mother, Eileen, during the last years of her life, Dayton often stayed in the guesthouse with her husband, where the pared-back space nudged them into routines that responded to the surrounding coast. The space offered the couple a “private retreat” where they could hear the birds, see the leaves and “feel the sand even when you weren’t standing on it,” Dayton said. “It invited you to enter another space and a better space.”
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