Richard Neutra's Unforgettable Home for a Forgotten Ukrainian Actress!
In the early days of Hollywood, movie-producer Samuel Goldwyn saw promise in Ukrainian film-actress Anna Sten, the daughter of a Cossack-actor father and a Swedish-ballerina mother. After seeing Anna perform in German and Ukrainian films and her head-turning beauty, Goldwyn saw Anna as a Russian Greta Garbo and encouraged Anna and her husband to relocate to Hollywood. When Anna and her movie-producer-husband, Eugene Frenke, arrived in California to begin her movie career, they wanted a home that would impress their future Hollywood celebrity guests. They engaged Austrian-born, mid-century-architect Richard Neutra to design their home in Santa Monica. Now updated and restored to Neutra’s original plans, the Sten-Frenke House has just hit the market priced at $15 million.