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The Iconic Home From This Slim Aarons Photo Is on the Market for $25 Million

Photo credit: Slim Aarons - Getty Images
Photo credit: Slim Aarons - Getty Images

From House Beautiful

Whom among us hasn't wished we could live in a Slim Aarons photograph? The roving photographer made a name for himself in the midcentury capturing well-heeled subjects in various states of leisure and repose around the world—often against the backdrops of their impressive real estate holdings and draped in designer couture. Well, now the setting for one of Aarons's most famous photographs could be yours—if you have $25 million to spare.

The five-bedroom home prioritizes indoor-outdoor living, with a series of sliding doors connecting indoor rooms to the expansive patios. Listed with Sotheby's International Realty for $25 million, it's posed to shatter the record for a home in the modernist mecca of Palm Springs, where Bob Hope's onetime home went for $13 million in 2016. So how did this particular modernist house get so famous as to command such a wild price?

In 1970, Aarons captured Nelda Linsk and Helen Dzo Dzo—both sporting bouffants and loungewear befitting the era—chatting poolside at Kaufmann Desert House, a modern icon by Hungarian-American architect Richard Neutra in Palm Springs, California. At the time, Linsk owned the home along with her husband, the art dealer Joseph Linsk, and they often entertained by the pool. The patio affords a mountain view—though the scene Aarons captured wasn't exactly a candid one.

Photo credit: Jason Auch - Getty Images
Photo credit: Jason Auch - Getty Images

"It was 1970. It was in February, I think. It was about 11 in the morning. Slim called us," Nelda recalled to The New York Times in a 2015 story. "He knew our house was a Neutra. He said: 'I want to come over and do a pool shot. Call some friends over.'"

The photographer even art-directed the women's wardrobe, encouraging Nelda to wear yellow to coordinate with the pool umbrella at the background of his shot. "It was so casual," Nelda told the Times of the shoot. "He came with his tripod. The shoot was about an hour and a half. We had Champagne and socialized for an hour or two afterward. It was a fun day. I had no idea it would become that famous. I wish I had royalties."

Indeed, the photograph would go on to become a symbol of a certain kind of easy living in the modernist era—and make famous the house depicted in it, an icon it its own right. Neutra, who cut his teeth working for Frank Lloyd Wright, built the Kaufmann Desert house in 1946 for department store tycoon Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., the same patron who commissioned Wright's famous Fallingwater a decade earlier. The home was one of Neutra's biggest commissions, and an opportunity to show off his nature-informed modernist aesthetic (a sensibility he shared with Wright).

Interested? See the listing here.

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