After a brief stint on the market and at auction in 2019, Frank Lloyd Wright’s final residential design is back up for sale for $8.95 million, and the iconic Phoenix house is all curves.
Wright — who, even more than 50 years after his death, remains one the best-know architects in the United States — completed the design for what would become the Norman Lykes Home just before his passing in 1959.
One of Wright’s apprentice architects, John Rattenbury, saw the project through its construction and eventual completion in 1967. Rattenbury made only one deviation from Wright’s original plan, says Deanna Peters, the home’s listing agent.
“He added the office on top of the house,” Peters said. “It kind of makes the house look like a little bit of a spaceship.”
And the property does look otherworldly. Also called the Circular Sun House, the residence is a series of circles knit together by curves and other circles; seen from above, the structure resembles an ice cream scooper. At the same time, it is in and of its arid Arizona surroundings. Surrounded by stately saguaro cacti, the rounded forms of the three-bedroom, three-bathroom residence look as if they were carved out of the sloping desert upon which it sits.
As the property changed hands over the years, Peters said, its owners made an effort “to keep to the style of Frank Lloyd Wright.” In 1994, Linda Melton purchased the property for $500,000 and tasked Rattenbury with updating the house true-to-style, maintaining the original wood and curved steel casement windows. Melton did include one personal touch: a large purple couch built to rest against one of the curving walls.
Peters heard that the purple couch may have triggered a falling out between Melton and Rattenbury’s wife, Kay, also an architect, but even today it remains nestled against the wall.
In 2019, the Norman Likes Residence was listed for $2.65 million, but it was quickly delisted and auctioned off instead. Following what Heritage Auctions called an “intense global marketing public relations campaign,” the residence sold for roughly $1.68 million, or, according to HA, about 70% more than sales of comparable homes in the area at the time.
The buyer purchased the property as an investment, updating some of its mechanical systems before renting it out as an Airbnb that attracted “steady” traffic, Peters said. Shopping channel QVC even briefly leased the home in 2021 as a broadcast location.
After listing it in 2020 for $7.95 million and in 2023 as a fractional listing totaling $8.9 million, the house is back on the market for $8.95 million and open to a range of buyer options and motivations.
If qualified buyers interested in a fractional sale materialized, eventual ownership could “upgrade the house and then basically keep the house as original as possible and then create it as an experience so people could come to the house and stay there,” Peters said.
“You’re not just buying a house, you’re buying a piece of history,” she explained.
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