Frank Gehry Sirmai-Peterson to Vitra, 1978–1989
The Sirmai-Peterson House — Frank Gehry’s 1983–88 cluster of cubic pavilions in Thousand Oaks, California — sold quietly in 2026, the last Gehry residence in private hands designed before his 1989 Vitra Design Museum commission redirected him toward institutional architecture. The Frank Gehry Sirmai-Peterson sale, reported by Wallpaper on 27 April 2026 and brokered by The Value of Architecture, closes a small and specific chapter in Los Angeles residential history. Between his own Gehry Residence at 1002 22nd Street in Santa Monica, completed in 1978, and the Vitra Design Museum that opened in Weil am Rhein in 1989, Gehry built a handful of private houses in greater Los Angeles that effectively served as full-scale models for everything that came after. The Sirmai-Peterson House — designed with Greg Walsh, completed five years after it was commissioned, and sited on a sloped, oak-studded hillside overlooking a pond — is the last of those experiments to change hands. Its sale to a medical professor and his wife, who plan roof repairs but have committed to preserve the design, is also a hinge: the moment at which the residential lineage that produced Gehry’s institutional career is finally treated as architectural patrimony rather than as a place to live. ...