Dr. Neal Baer—best known in entertainment circles as a writer for E.R.—has picked up an iconic mid-century modern home in Hollywood Hills West. Baer purchased the property for $4.35 million; it had been priced at $4.5 million.

The home has a unique history: it was owned by Albert Wohlstetter, one of the people who conjured and sustained the fantasy of a winnable nuclear war. A characterization partly based on Wohlstetter appeared in the satirical, gallows-humor disarmament classic, “Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,’ although Wohlstetter’s peer, Herman Kahn, is certainly in the character of Strangelove as well. Interestingly, the Wohlstetter home is the work of architect Josef Van der Kar, who was a card-carrying communist. Van der Kar lived next door.

H-bomb tension juju notwithstanding, the house is a beautiful example of the style, and a wonderful acquisition: formal via the functional, boxy and utilitarian, the beauty of a home like this rests partly in contrast: the fact that its creative flourishes stand out so boldly against its logical design elements. Exterior toning accents are rendered in a blend of bright warm and cool. The house’s roofline is angled slightly skyward, as if about to take flight; it is a motif which crops up in Van der Kar’s work, indicating a threshold of potential.

Interiors are expressed in a thought-provoking combination of warm tones, wood grain, and angularity. The home measures 2,700 square feet, and contains three bedrooms and three baths. The property also includes a guest house among gardens designed in the Japanese style, a koi pond, and a ramada.

As an intern out of Harvard Med, Baer was drawn inexorably into television. He was hired for the first season of ‘E.R.’; he remained with the program for seven seasons as a writer and producer.