A century-old modernist landmark on the Newport Beach waterfront has come up for sale, carrying one of the more eccentric origin stories in American residential architecture. The Lovell Beach House, completed in 1926 by Austrian-American architect Rudolph Schindler, is listed at an estimated $18.8 million, ending a hundred years in the hands of the same family.

The client was Philip Lovell, a Los Angeles naturopath whose newspaper column, Care of the Body, urged readers toward vegetarian food, exercise, fresh air and nude sunbathing. He believed a house itself could promote health, and the beach house took that conviction literally. Instead of bedrooms, Schindler gave the family four open-air sleeping porches attached to small dressing rooms, so they could spend as much of the night as possible outdoors.

Southern California's overnight fog had other ideas. Within about two years, the damp, chilly air forced the family to enclose the porches and turn them into conventional bedrooms. The experiment failed as a way of living, yet the house itself survived as a major work. Raised on distinctive concrete frames, with broad windows facing the Pacific, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and regarded as one of Schindler's most significant buildings.

The Lovells' relationship with modern architecture ran further than this one house. Schindler designed three homes for the family and wrote a series on healthy houses for Philip Lovell's column, while Richard Neutra later built the better-known Lovell Health House above Los Angeles, completed in 1929. The beach house, by contrast, was the home the family actually preferred to live in, and its survival is unusual on a peninsula where many period houses have been demolished for larger replacements. The sale now tests what a buyer will pay for a building whose value lies as much in its ideas, and its famous failure, as in its oceanfront rooms.