Even before Wallace E. Cunningham finished his studies at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in the late 1970s, the architectural designer received his first independent commission. A couple relocating from the Midwest to the San Diego area tapped Cunningham and his elastic mind to design a bold, one-of-a-kind home on almost four and a half rolling acres in Rancho Santa Fe, about 25 miles north of downtown San Diego.
The sinuous result, crafted predominantly from steel, concrete, and glass and on which Cunningham bestowed the name Wing House, is now available for $10.5 million to avant-garde architecture lovers with a penchant for the ‘burbs and a thing for curves. Matt Altman, Josh Altman, and Jason Saks of Douglas Elliman.
Cunningham configured the roughly 3,800-square-foot residence as a series of Kandinsky-esque concentric circles in two overlapping wings that follow the contours of the land and form an S shape. In the open space between the curved wings, an open-ended courtyard holds a crescent moon-shaped zero-edge pool. There are three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms in the main part of the house, while a secondary structure that mirrors the design of the main house offers guests, family members, or staff three bedrooms, a full kitchen, and a bathroom.
Wing House first changed hands in 1989, when it was purchased by a local physician, who kept it for about a decade. Records show it was acquired in 1998 by a family trust for $1.285 million. The home was featured in Architectural Digest in 2002, and today it looks remarkably as it did then.
Invisible from the gated entrance, the sweeping curves of the house, which hug a slight rise in the land, come into view. From the driveway and three-car garage, a long, lighted set of concrete steps leads to the front door. Public rooms are located at the intersection of the two curves. In the great room, there’s a spare, minimalist fireplace and a massive eye-shaped skylight that showers the space with natural light. Sliding walls of glass unite the room with the outdoors.
The kitchen is concealed behind a curved wall that stops just short of the high, flat ceiling. An expert level of craftsmanship was required to build and install the sleekly curvilinear wooden cabinetry, and some imagination was required to conceive and construct a pair of overlapping circular islands that are bisected by a frameless wall of glass. The half that services the kitchen incorporates a breakfast bar for two, while the outside half is the perfect spot for serving up a casual poolside snack.
A small pond near the front door tumbles down between boulders to a smaller pond, and several patios encircle the home. The acreage provides total privacy and an unspoiled landscape, while the owned solar array helps generate electricity to power the house and pool.
Another of Cunningham’s eye-catching creations, this one in Park City, Utah, and dubbed Cascade, is also on the market for $22.9 million, and the daring architectural designer’s most famous residence, a thrillingly sited blufftop confection known as the Razor House, was purchased in 2019 for $20.8 million by Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz.
Click here for more photos of Wing House.
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