Schindler's Lovell Beach House Lists for $18.8 Million

The Lovell Beach House, Rudolph Schindler's 1926 Modernist landmark on Newport Beach's Balboa Peninsula, is on the market for $18.8 million. It is the first time in a century that the house has left the Lovell family. Considering what happened to the family's original sleeping arrangements, the house itself has aged rather well.

What are you actually buying?

A four-bedroom, four-bathroom house of just 2,741 square feet. By the standards of today's $18.8 million beachfront properties, that isn't much. Buyers aren't paying for square footage. They're paying for five enormous concrete frames, squared-off like figure eights, that raise the living quarters above the beach — a maneuver that bought the family privacy from beachgoers and sweeping views of the Pacific.

Inside: a double-height living room with a towering glass wall, a balcony over the main floor, and built-in furniture designed by Schindler himself. The listing, in other words, covers one of the most celebrated examples of early California Modernism (the movement that brought European avant-garde design to the West Coast in the 1920s).

Why does the house look like that?

Blame Philip Lovell's health theories. Lovell, a naturopath who wrote the Los Angeles Times column Care of the Body, believed in vegetarianism, exercise, fresh air and nude sunbathing. He thought a house should make its occupants healthier, not merely shelter them.

So Schindler delivered open-air sleeping porches instead of bedrooms, a rooftop sunbathing terrace, and a bathroom with roughly five shower heads arranged so bathers could lie down beneath running water. The experiment lasted about two years. The California coast gets chilly at night, and Newport Beach's fog had no respect for Lovell's theories. In 1928, Schindler returned to enclose the porches and convert them into conventional bedrooms.

Who else is in the story?

Richard Neutra, who became one of Schindler's great professional rivals, designed the landscaping. The two Austrian-born architects — Schindler had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright — were once friends and collaborators. The Lovells helped end that. After the beach house, they hired Neutra to design their Los Angeles residence, the equally famous Lovell Health House, completed in 1929. The commission helped establish Neutra's reputation and contributed to the falling-out.

The beach house was never a museum piece. Philip and his wife, Leah, made it their permanent home and entertained artists and intellectuals there. Photographer Edward Weston visited. According to the family, Paul Robeson once performed in the living room.

How did it reach the market?

The house passed through several generations. In the early 1970s, the Lovells' youngest son, Gary, acquired it from his father and brother for about $50,000. He and his wife, Barbara, opened up the kitchen and split the enormous original bathroom in two. Barbara lived there until her death in 2025. The family kept most of Schindler's design intact, including the built-in furniture.

The house joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Architecture enthusiasts still arrive by the busload, the Lovell grandchildren say, to photograph and sketch it.

Leah Lovell, asked by architectural historian Esther McCoy in 1958 why she preferred the beach house to Neutra's more famous Los Angeles residence, gave her verdict: "It just fitted us."

A hundred years on, the house needs someone else it fits. Preferably someone with $18.8 million and a tolerance for the occasional chilly ocean breeze.