Alice Ball

If you're interested in the fate of Philip Johnson's Alice Ball house, in New Canaan, you no doubt have already seen the Times story from Sunday and the post in Mediabistro.com (which linked to us; the Times, of course, did not, although the Times reporter spent a lot of time clicking around on our blog about two weeks ago while preparing the story).

The Times story is a rehash, although it does manage to get one important fact wrong: it cites as an example of modern houses commanding steep prices the sale of Neutra's Kaufmann house not long ago. But I read in the Times the other day that the sale did not go through; the anonymous buyer has either backed out or couldn't come up with the money or something, it wasn't clear (in fairness to the Times reporter, the Alice Ball house story was in a section that goes to press earlier in the week, and the news about the Kaufmann house sale might have come out afterwards).

Mediabistro.com isn't quite as kind to Cristina Ross, the owner of the house, as we have been, and I find the snarky style of the writing to be off-putting, but here's the post (which, by the way, uses our photo, which is fine -- we put it on Flickr and we ourselves rarely feel any compunction against using other people's photos). -- ta