It took a flatbed truck, a California Highway Patrol escort and a crane to get a flying saucer onto a granite outcrop in the San Jacinto Mountains. In December 2004, shrink-wrapped for the roughly 126-mile haul from San Diego, it drew a tail of about 40 people in cars. “We blocked three lanes of traffic,” Wayne Donaldson told the Journal's Katherine Clarke. It's sat in Pine Cove, about five miles north of Idyllwild, ever since — harvest gold and some 26 feet across. Now it's for sale at $1.495 million, for the most human reason in Friday's Mansion section.
It's a Futuro, a plastic house the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen dreamed up in the late 1960s, back when plastic looked like the future and the Space Age was a mood. Something like 100 were made; nobody keeps an official tally, but maybe 50 or 60 are left. This one is on the National Register of Historic Places. Inside: about 800 square feet, one bedroom, one bath, linoleum floors and a popcorn ceiling flecked with gold, most of it original. You climb in through a hatch in the belly. No dusting, ever, he says — the thing is close to sealed — though the shell wants a coat of wax every year.
Donaldson, 83, is a preservation architect — President Obama's appointee to chair the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation — and he once taught a course on plastics in architecture. In the late 1970s he got word of a Futuro rotting in a parking lot behind the San Diego Design Center, windows smashed, paint peeling, demolition already started. He doesn't remember what he paid. A friend let him park it at a boat yard while repairs began. The land came in 2004: roughly half an acre in Pine Cove for about $70,000. A standard helicopter couldn't lift the thing and an airlift meant FAA permits, so it went by truck. For years the couple drove up from their main house near Sacramento, six to eight hours each way, for about a week a month.
Why now
His health is failing, he says, and the place is getting harder to keep up. The line that stops you is about her. Laurie is 66, and if something happens to him, she's “not going to be strapped with trying to sell it.” He'd rather choose the next owner now — someone who loves the thing, not someone shopping for a short-term rental. Listing agent Tim McTavish of Desert Sotheby's International Realty has architecture collectors, museums and foundations in mind. He'll need them. Futuros rarely trade, and the few sales on record from recent decades ran $50,000 to $100,000 — for unlivable wrecks, Donaldson says. The $1.495 million ask is a hope with a landmark plaque on it.
Our read
This is Estate planning, the version nobody writes down. The hardest things to inherit are the one-of-a-kind things — no comparables, a buyer pool you could seat at one table, an annual wax, a day's drive. Leave that to a surviving spouse and you've left a project, not an asset, and a 17-year age gap (our arithmetic, 83 against 66) makes the odds plain. Donaldson is doing the hard part himself while he can still tell the story, choose the buyer and argue the price. Note the small confession, too — he can't recall what he paid for the structure. Sell in your lifetime and your cost, the purchase plus what went into restoring it, sets the taxable gain; a missing number and lost receipts cost real money.
That's the honest trade-off. Under current law an inherited asset generally takes a fresh cost basis at death, so a sale now may carry a tax bill that waiting could shrink or erase. Whether or not he ran that math, he's put her burden first — a legitimate call, and the point is that it's a call, made on purpose, by the person who understands the thing. If you own a cabin, a boat or a collection, your plan should name who sells it, when and to whom. You check the roof on a dry day, not when the ceiling's dripping; the same goes for whatever your spouse would otherwise have to figure out alone.