The best architect-designed homes for sale this summer, from Le Corbusier to Frank Lloyd Wright

Every time an architectural masterpiece returns to the real estate market, something unusual happens: for a few weeks, interiors that normally remain invisible become public. Photographs, floor plans, and construction details allow us to step into homes that, in most cases, we only know through architectural history.

From the Tennessee house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed without ever seeing the land it would rise on, to David Bowie‘s New York apartment overlooking Central Park, down to one of the very rare Unité d’Habitation apartments left intact just as Le Corbusier designed it, we have gathered the homes that this year made us dream of changing our address, at least for the duration of a vacation.

In this geography of living, celebrated figures coexist with masters who have remained on the margins of the Modern narrative for far too long. There is Leonardo Ricci, who on the Tuscan coast turned the “unfinished” into a way of inhabiting the landscape, and Fernand Pouillon, the great protagonist of Marseille’s reconstruction who defended both the affordability of housing and the right to beauty.

Alongside them, Italian architectures with an equally extraordinary history resurface, many of which had never hit the market before. There is the only house designed by Gae Aulenti in the hills of Pisa, Umberto Mastroianni’s Turin home and studio designed by Enzo Venturelli, and, in Milan, Villa Nava, which showcases the most radical side of Francesco Castiglioni. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the house that architect Mart van Schijndel built for himself reappears, having become one of the manifestos of Dutch postmodernism. Ten dwellings that, even before being high-end real estate, tell the story of different ways of understanding domestic design.

In the Unité d’Habitation, a Le Corbusier apartment in its original state

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Le Corbusier architect, Type E duplex, Cité Radieuse, Marsiglia, 1952

Inside the Unité, there is a duplex still close to its original state: a kitchen by Charlotte Perriand, typical colors, and double-height spaces open to the landscape. Continue reading

David Bowie’s New York home, which is like a museum dedicated to the singer-songwriter

In New York, among the real estate icons dotting the perimeter of Central Park, the apartment where David Bowie and Iman lived between 1992 and 2002 has returned to the market inside the Essex House, a historic Art Deco building overlooking Central Park South. Continue reading

Villa Nava, a manifesto of residential brutalism in Milan

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Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

Francesco Castiglioni, Villa Nava, Cusano Milanino

Courtesy Italy Sotheby’s International Realty

In Cusano Milanino, this villa designed in the 1970s by Francesco Castiglioni breaks the area’s Art Nouveau sequence with a system of volumes, glass walls, and concrete terraces. Continue reading

The house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed without ever seeing the land it would rise on