This month, actress Linda Gray listed the Santa Clarita property she built with her designer husband Ed Thrasher — a now-legendary rock and jazz album cover artist known to some of the vinyl collectors out there — in the early 1970s. The 4,800 sq. ft., 2.66-acre estate appeared on the open market with an asking price of $2.995 million.
The pair commissioned A. Quincy Jones to design the five-bedroom estate, which has been titled Oak Tree Ranch. According to Dirt, Jones was engaged in a major project that year: designing the Warner Bros. Records building. Thrasher was art director at Warner while Gray’s career heated up, and thereby hangs a likely tale.
The result is something of an architectural paean to early 1970s zeitgeist, when a contemporary home was just a wood-clad high modern, the intelligentsia considered The Band the best rock outfit in the land, and sandalwood incense sold by the metric ton. Sheathed in a weather-beaten layer of timber, a soft-focus shot of the house and the property that frames it would’ve been at home on the album cover by country rockers Mason Proffit that earned Thrasher a Grammy.
The interiors of the main house carry the spirit to its natural conclusion; flourishes include the closely-shaved tree trunks that act as supports in the shared living area. But the home also has the clean lines and uncluttered feel of modernism, and the pristine surfaces of tile and polished concrete, so even in its more effusive moments it neatly avoids sentimentality. A feeling of serene equipoise suffuses the home.
In short, it’s an estate with a turnkey style that may well accrue fashion value as the century deepens into tech ubiquity. The master suite, which combines a step-up sleeping area with a fireplace and window seat with a skylight, glass double doors, and semi-vaulted ceiling, is a good example of the home’s sensibilities, and its cozy separate reading nook with a U-shaped bank of built-in shelves and a set of double doors of its own is almost worth the price of admission all by itself.
