A thin layer of hardwood is applied to the flat surfaces, providing the cardboard-constructed furniture with enough durability for everyday use.

A small terrace outfitted with an H55 easy chair by Björn Hultén offers a view of the San Francisco Bay.

Despite its popularity, Gehry halted production of the Wiggle Side chair only two years after the collection launched. Production on the Easy Edges collection resumed in 1986, when Vitra reissued four central pieces.

As his parents look on, Apolo plans his commute under a fire-top piece by the artist Michael Ricardo Andreev and alongside a Wiggle chair by Frank Gehry.

A PK 22 Easy Chair by Poul Kjaerholm for Fritz Hansen adds a dash of yellow to the breakfast room.

Wiggle Side Chair designed by Frank Gehry, 1972.

Inside, white paint lightens up the middle of the building. A vintage Danish dining set and Cloud pendants by Frank Gehry for Vitra define the dining area.

Shannon and his wife, Amy, take the air on a small patio in two Acapulco chairs.

Experience Music Project by Gehry Partners, Seattle 1999, shot for Vulcan, Inc. © Lara Swimmer

2008: Frank Gehry Inspired by da Vinci’s drawings of wooden catapults as well as seaside huts, Gehry’s vision for the Pavilion, his first built structure in England, was another signature, angular construction, a gorgeous glass-and-timber fractal floating above the ground. Photograph © 2008 Nick Rochowski

The windows on the right look out to Manhattan. The blue Acapulco chair echoes the aquatic tones of the bathroom tiles.

This stylized vintage trailer is the image of small-scale luxury.

This incredible rare prototype of the Easy Edges collection dates to 1969 and was purchased directly from Gehry.

Maggie's Dundee exterior. Architect: Frank Gehry. Pic © Raf Makda, August 2003.

Fisher Center at Bard College by Gehry Partners, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 2003. © Bilyana Dimitrova

This bathroom, tiled in bright blue mosaic to offset the home’s limited materials and color palette, calls for a simple vanity. The sinks, toilets, and tubs are by Villeroy & Boch, while the faucets and towel rails are by Grohe and Avenir, respectively.

Dundee Exterior. Roof Architect: Frank Gehry. © Maggie's Centres

Dundee jetty. Architect: Frank Gehry. © Maggie's Centres.

Dundee exterior and landscape. Architect: Frank Gehry. Landscape Architect: Arabella Lennox-Boyd. © Maggie's Centres

“The building has feelings which I hope engender community activity, and that it’s comfortable for the patients to be there. It’s respectful of Chinese architecture and motifs.” —Frank Gehry

In the garden room, Juhl's 1957 Japanese chair lies next to a sofa table and a built-in bench, designed for the house. The blue upholstery matches Anna Thommsen’s carpet.

It requires roughly ten hours for a craftsman to weave paper cord across the curved frame of this oak Easy Chair (1950) before it’s complete. Another example of Wegner melding design and material without unnecessary fuss or adornment. Photo courtesy Carl Hansen & Son.

Choosing your living room's go-to lounging piece just got easier with these editor-approved easy chairs.

The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, designed by Frank Gehry, 1989.

THE FRANK GEHRY RIGHT TWIST CUBE This cube is a multipurpose piece, as it can be used as a side table or a stool for sitting. Designed with a graceful twist, the cube works well as a singular accent, or as a complement to other pieces in the Frank Gehry collection.

The Wintons commissioned Gehry after reading about his work in The New York Times in 1982. It was the pick of a client with premonition, and as the final structure indicates, an open mind. The architect was asked to create a space for the Wintons' visiting family—five kids and plenty of grandchildren necessitated the extra room—and complement the main home, a brick Philip Johnson “donut” on a 12-acre plot on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. But Gehry followed his own muse, and often talked about the home he created as pure sculpture, according to Victoria Young, the Professor of Modern Architectural History at St. Thomas University and Coordinator of Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House. “Even the original models have all these disparate shapes,” she says. “The first model he presented to them had a log cabin, referencing the fact that the Wintons' fortune came from Canadian lumber." Since it was a guest house, Gehry felt free to experiment. "You can explore things in a way you can’t in a place people live in all the time.”

Gehry’s first project outside of California, the 2,300-square-foot guest house represented more than a geographic transition. According to Young, this home was a key moment for the evolution of Gehry’s style. At a time when Philip Johnson was designing that AT&T building and quintessential postmodern structures were being built, Gehry was “breaking apart the understanding of a building. That’s what postmodernists do, but not the way Gehry does. He was doing something completely different. With Winton, he breaks apart the building, but hasn’t cladded it in the same material. It’s a really pivotal moment of breaking apart the structure into these shapes.”

“The Winton House combines Gehry’s love of sculpture, his interest in urbanism—as each form is said to be a building in a village—and his expression as an artist, given the relationship he cited with the painter Morandi,” says MacLear. The guest home provided an interesting contrast to the classical, International-Style modernism of Johnson’s main residence, perhaps a physical metaphor to where both architects were at in their careers, one a known master, the other a young creative trying to find his voice. “Philip Johnson loved Frank Gehry not only because they both loved art and architecture,” says MacLear, “but because Frank gave Philip what all mentors want—a new view into the ideas of the future.”

“It really synthesizes the ideas that turn out to be his signature style,” says Richard Wright, “The concept of a little village of disparate masses that come together to form a united structure, each with very different volumes and voices. You certainly see that in Bilbao and his true masterpieces. He was working on these ideas in houses before this, but I think he really nails it it with the Winton project.”

“The grandkids loved it; they loved the loft space,” says Young. “The light in that space is fantastic, it just creeps up the wall. [The house] is filled with all these unexpected moments.”

“Early in his career, Gehry was able to experiment with his own home—deconstructing rooms and functions into the shapes of the actual residence—and explore materials which are non-traditional,” says Christy MacLear, Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. “The Winton Guest House happens in ’87, and is the step between his own home and his commission at the University of Minnesota in ’90 where he moves his deconstructionist style toward what we see in ’97 in Bilbao.”

Wright’s auction estimate, $1,000,000 to $1,500,000, is not a high bar for a Gehry, as Richard Wright explains, but there will be some added cost for whomever has the winning bid. Moving the structure, a condition of purchasing the home, will probably require complete disassembly and a cross-country move on a flatbed truck. Wright was quoted $800,000 for a 110-mile move, and says no move within the continental United States would be more than $2,000,000. It’ll be interesting to see where the structure lands, in private hands or a museum, because as Young puts it, “nobody has figured out how to live in it full time.” The guest bedrooms don’t have much space for extra furniture, and the kitchen is just a simple galley kitchen.

The budget was nearly as tight as the space in this cheerful renovation of a 516-square-foot flat in Bratislava. The centerpiece of Lukáš Kordík’s new kitchen is the cabinetry surrounding the sink, a feat he managed by altering the facing and pulls of an off-the-rack Ikea system. The laminate offers a good punch of blue, and in modernist fashion, Kordík forwent door handles in favor of cutouts. “I wanted the kitchen to be one simple block of color without any additional design,” he says.

The dining room features 1970s leather-and-brass dining chairs and a table concocted from a brass-and-silver base and a custom lacquered top. The cheerful blue paint enlivening the doorway is from Emery & Cie.

The children’s rooms, which are reserved for family and an extended network of friends, feature more custom Crasset-designed beds set against a vivid blue backdrop, courtesy of the French paint brand Zolpan.