Early Gehry House for Sale

Apparently 2015 is a time of great change for Dempsey: his "McDreamy" character on Grey's Anatomy was killed off last week; he and his wife filed for divorce in January; and he is selling the house he has lived in with his wife and three kids since for the last six years. In 2009 he became the Gehry building's fourth owner by paying $7 million for the 5,500-square-foot house that sits on five acres in Malibu, California.

The house and studio that Gehry designed for painter Davis in 1968 is representative of the architect's early work, when he used primarily inexpensive materials, in this case corrugated galvanized steel and exposed plywood. As described by Francesco dal Co and Kurt Forster in a monograph on Gehry, the building was "conceived simply as a container for movable things, a singular, barnlike structure that would sit on the landscape and confront the terrain in an uncompromising way."

The house was framed in Douglas fir, which was left exposed above partial-height walls that gave the interior a loft-like feel and gave the artist opportunities to insert different levels and increase the usable floor space. This would happen eventually with the subsequent owners.

Davis lived and worked in the Gehry creation until 1992, when he sold it to a couple who lived there until 2003. Subsequently, the third owner did some renovations inside and out, as did Dempsey when he bought the house in 2010 as a home for his family of five. As mentioned in an in-depth profile in Architectural Digest last year, many of the changes took place in the garden to make it "a family fun zone" and to build enclosures for "the Dempseys’ ever-growing menagerie of chickens, miniature donkeys, rabbits, goats, pigs, and one rescued African tortoise." As can be seen in the exterior photo below, the trees had grown in the years since the house's 1972 completion, making the building an integrated part of its site rather than one standing out from it, as the archival photo at top attests.

It's also apparent in the below photo that Gehry's signature corrugated steel on the outside of the house has been a steady feature over the years. The interiors were decorated for the Dempsey family "to give coziness and livability to the idiosyncratic interior spaces," which the previous owner had transformed by covering up some of the exposed wood structure and inserting floors, amid other changes. So given the state of the house and its grounds, the future owner won't be buying "a Gehry" so much as a house designed by Gehry that has evolved over the years, yet in ways the architect allowed for through his design.