Forget Fine Wine or Exotic Cars. They’re Putting Their Money On Niche Portable Structures

In late March, in the sun-dappled courtyard of Los Angeles’s famous Pacific Design Center, design fans found themselves temporarily transported to the white sand beaches of Sanibel Island in Southwest Florida.

On display amid a wide collection of sculptures and furniture was the Walker Guest House, the white-framed beachfront home designed by architect Paul Rudolph in 1951. The curated fashion and design platform Basic.Space was hosting a real-world shopping experience, including an auction for the important modernist beach house, celebrated for its external frame, movable series of panel walls, and red cannonball counterweights that give it the appearance of a spider scurrying across Gulf Coast shores.

In recent years, the market for rare, small homes and pavilions has boomed, driven by well-heeled collectors who are developing an appreciation for unique architectural baubles. Previous iterations of the Serpentine Pavilion—an annual summer commission for a temporary structure in London’s Kensington Gardens—by starchitects such as Zaha Hadid and Bjarke Ingles have fetched mid-six figures or more, with others having second lives as beachfront restaurants, event spaces, and even a concert venue. Property developer Victor Hwang purchased the 2002 Toyo Ito-designed Serpentine Pavilion, using it as a promotional piece for developments in London and St. Tropez. Irish property developer Patrick McKillen bought and moved a Frank Gehry Serpentine piece to his estate and winery in the south of France.

The work of French industrial designer Jean Prouvé comes up for auction often, his demountable prefab structures fetching significant sums. A small cadre of collectors, including artist Richard Price, have bought Prouvé designs; fashion designer Azzedine Alaia slept inside a Prouvé gas station assembled inside his apartment. In 2021, a six-by-nine-foot demountable home that had been used as a pool house sold for $441,000 at a London auction, about 15 percent higher than expected, and last May in New York City, the Croismare School, Prouvé’s largest such structure, was up for auction at the European Fine Art Fair; it’s still seeking a buyer.

At last year’s Basic.Space event, another Prouvé gas station fetched $1 million at auction. The buyer, who prefers to remain anonymous, told Dwell that they hadn’t sought out a Prouvé piece in particular, but once they saw it on display, they found it intriguing; it currently sits in the yard of their Palm Beach home functioning as a pavilion for the tennis court, stocked with magazines and bottles of fresh-squeezed orange juice. The collector doesn’t make a habit of seeking out prefabs, but when sought after artworks can fetch tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, a more interactive, functional piece of design—which ended up being relatively easy to move and maintain—seemed pretty fun and somewhat low cost. It also reminded them of Burning Man and the power of temporary, movable structures. "It felt super cool and edgy, and if I wanted to I could put it up or take it down somewhere in a few days or sell it," they say. "From the community standpoint, it’s something I can share a little bit."

The Walker Guest House last changed hands in 2019 via a Sotheby’s auction, when it was bought for $750,000 by an undisclosed purchaser who has kept it in storage ever since. (Reportedly, Belgian art collector Peter Gallieaert bought it and shipped it to Palm Springs.) At the Pacific Design Center in L.A. in March, the starting bid was $2 million, and while multiple parties have expressed interest, a final price hasn’t been reached, according to Jesse Lee, who founded Basic.Space in 2019.

Lee, who says he was contacted by the current owner, had to split the Guest House in two to transport it to the design center, where it was reconnected on-site. A trendsetter who understands the pulse of collectors, Lee doesn’t have the next piece ready for auction, but says they’ll definitely be selling another soon. "Obviously it’s not a common thing to own," he says. "However, we believe there’s a growing market for collectors with homes and properties that can accommodate what we consider a piece of art."

Prouvé’s work remains the most sought after. His steel-and-aluminum projects, designed to assist with France’s postwar housing shortage, were rediscovered in the 1990s and 2000s; French art collector Eric Touchaleaume traveled to what was once Niger and Congo in 2000, where a handful of Prouvé homes were used by local families as homes. He bought them from the current owners, and then resold them at considerable profit at auction. The anonymous gas station buyer at Basic.Space expects their investment to appreciate over time.

Gallerist Patrick Seguin, who buys and sells Prouvé pieces, and displayed a dozen examples of his demountable architecture as part of a 2017 collaboration in Arles, France, says that collectors of Jean Prouvé’s demountable houses "are particularly drawn to the philosophy behind their design, the ingenuity of their simplicity of construction. These houses are marvels of engineering and intelligence. I would almost say they have a soul." The ease of assembly, and the patina, provenance, and sense of history, make these structures particularly fit for collectors, he adds. Examples can be found in major private collections in the United States, Europe, and Asia, as well as in institutions and museums such as the Centre Pompidou.

At the Basic.Space event in March, one got the sense most in attendance weren’t ready to bid on the Walker Guest House so much as see how rapper A$AP Rocky had decked it out with art objects, such as the Iconic Carlton Memphis book shelf and a retro synthesizer. As visitors circled through the small, elevated home, a slight gap was evident between the two halves of the structure. It was a scar from moving, one that would be repaired when the building found its next home with a new owner.

"Like anything that’s worth collecting, it’s a blend of rarity and uniqueness of the structure," says Lee of the collectible prefab market. "As time goes by, fewer examples remain in good condition, making well preserved pieces like the Walker Guest House and Prouvé gas stations increasingly precious and in high demand."

Top photo by Photo by Matthew Kavanagh, courtesy Basic.Space

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