Back in 2015, New York-based architect Jon Stryker paid $6.8 million for a famously idiosyncratic Los Angeles home: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Storer House. One of only four Wright-designed Mayan Revival textile block houses in L.A, the Storer House was built into the side of a nearly sheer cliff, looming directly over the Sunset Strip’s eastern end. (At the time of Stryker’s purchase, the $6.8 million amount was the most ever paid for a Frank Lloyd Wright residence, a record since eclipsed by the nearby Ennis House.)
Thanks to a restoration project by former owner Joel Silver under the constant supervision of Wright’s grandson Eric Lloyd Wright and the Los Angeles Conservancy, the Storer House is believed to be perhaps the best-preserved Wright home on the West Coast, though its annual maintenance costs continue to be astronomical. It certainly helps that Stryker is a billionaire heir to the Stryker Corp. medical equipment fortune — Forbes says his current net worth tops $4.5 billion, making him America’s 222nd wealthiest person.
Atop the cliff directly above the Storer House lies a large chateau-style mansion. Built in 1926, the medieval castle-style home spans more than 7,700 square feet across multiple levels, all of them with windows overlooking the entire L.A. basin and the Storer House.
Last year, the chateau was sold for $8.5 million to “Walking Dead” actor Norman Reedus and his partner Diane Kruger, who quickly tired of the place, placing it up for sale this summer with a $9.2 million ask. Just sold for a discounted $8.9 million, records reveal the new owner happens to be the next-door neighbor — Jon Stryker himself.
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Image Credit: Google Maps While the home’s fanciful architecture may delight folks, fans of 1920s style may be disappointed by the Reedus home’s interiors. Former owners Robert and Cortney Novogratz, a married couple of interior designers who owned the property from 2015-2018, stripped out all remnants of the structure’s original style in favor of new-fangled decor that is indisputably chic and glossy, albeit in a rather generic, Restoration Hardware-meets-CB2 sort of way.
Amenities are wide-ranging and include a custom kitchen with Carrara marble countertops and SubZero appliances, Steelcase doors throughout, and custom hardwood floors hand-finished by English firm Schotten & Hansen. Also on hand are a combo family room/media lounge, a gym, a basement-level recording studio and a master suite with a private terrace overlooking the entire city.
Outside, the hillside lot incorporates terraced gardens filled with bunches of roses, mature trees and stone patios. There’s a full outdoor kitchen with BBQ center and pizza oven, plus a sports court, built-in children’s playset and a classically Old Hollywood oval swimming pool. For privacy, the entire property is walled and surrounded by tall hedges.
Reedus and Diane Kruger continue to own an $11.8 million townhouse in New York City’s leafy West Village neighborhood. Reedus also still holds several other properties, including a penthouse elsewhere in Manhattan, an upstate New York cottage occupied by his mother, and a multimillion-dollar, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home tucked away in the thick woods just outside Atlanta.
As for Stryker, the longtime architecture buff has his own costly real estate portfolio. In addition to the two side-by-side L.A. estates, he’s also completing construction on a $50 million West Village mansion. The 63-year-old also owns several other New York properties, several properties in his native Michigan, and a multi-acre estate in Aspen, Colorado.
Wolf Amer and Jon Grauman of The Agency jointly handled both sides of the transaction.
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