Last Home Designed by Modernist Icon Richard Neutra Up for Sale in France

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1892, architect Richard Neutra emigrated in the early 1920s to Southern California, where he would live and work for four decades before returning to Europe to live out his final years. Before his death in 1970, the Viennese visionary designed eight villas in various spots around Europe, including a bespoke family home about three hours by car north of Paris, near the border with Belgium. This property, in the northern French city of Lille’s commune of Croix, Neutra’s last work and his only in France, has just hit the market.

Completed in 1969 and declared a historic monument in 2000, the modernist villa was built for Marcel Delcourt, CEO of French mail-order company 3 Suisses, and his family, which included seven children. Measuring just under 4,000 square feet, the Delcourt villa distributes six bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen and office between its two floors.

Some of the villa’s interior fittings, such as the gravity-defying staircase, were designed by Neutra in conjunction with his partner Bruno Honegger and his architect son Dion. Other standout features include extensive walls of glass, sandstone floors, clerestory windows, and a bonanza of built-ins, from bookcases to seating to display cabinets. There’s also a basement and a three-car garage.

Updated over the years — the modern kitchen is certainly not original to the house and it’s not likely the tomato-red carpeting is either — the linear home sits in a sunny clearing at the high point of a great sweep of lawn. Per online marketing, the pedigreed property occupies a .55-acre lot in the heart of a wooded park in the city center of Croix, with a metro station just 100 meters away.

A rare opportunity for any architecture aficionado, the Delacourt villa is available through Architecture for Sale with an asking price of $2.4 million.