La Miniatura - $7.5 million for the "ugliest and cheapest thing in the building world"

Frank Lloyd Wright's words - not mine.

This month's Architectural Digest featured this "for sale" ad as La Miniatura is currently on the market. Built in 1923 in Pasadena for rare-book dealer Alice Millard, it was purchased in 2000 for $1.3 million and then a massive renovation took place. Nice profit in just 8 years. Tours are rarely offered as it's been inhabited - until now.

From 1917 to 1924 Frank Lloyd Wright spent much of his time in California, and there created a small number of buildings that remain classics of American architecture. Using a groundbreaking building process, which he called his "textile block system" these buildings were constructed with precast concrete blocks, molded with decoration on both sides and inset with glass to allow light to filter through in interesting patterns. The prototype was one of Wright's most famous buildings, "Hollyhock House", influenced by ancient Mayan design and built for heiress Aline Barnsdall in the Hollywood Hills. Other distinctive textile block homes of Wright's in California include the Ennis, Millard, Freeman, and Storer houses, as well as the controversial Arizona Biltmore Hotel (in Arizona).

I'm a big Wright fan. He's a native Wisconsinite like myself, and I'm researching two plays on "the greatest architect of the 20th Century". I'm particularly attracted to Wright's prairie-style homes, an innovation and philosophy set forth by Wright, as well as Taliesin, his main home in Spring Green, WI. I toured Wright's studio in Oak Park, IL last year and it was a real treat, and though these block-style homes have no interest for me, like him or not, Wright was so far ahead of his time it's not funny.