Would you pay $1.2 million for a trailer? An anonymous bidder did just that at Chicago-based auction house Wright’s sale of modern design on October 7. To be fair, this was no ordinary trailer but a 1948 Spartan whose aluminum-clad form had been incorporated by the late Bauhaus-trained designer and architect Marcel Breuer into a cantilevered modern house with a stone base and wood siding. Commissioned by the artist couple David Diao and Maureen Connor and designed and executed between 1949 and 1951, the unique structure was sold together with its adjacent artist’s studio — built by architect Tip Dorsel in 1960 — and 10-acre grounds in New York’s Duchess County.

The Breuer trailer-house is the latest in a series of modern residences that have been put on the block. Its sale follows Wright’s auctioning of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21 for more than $3.5 mil-lion in December 2006. In the past decade, Christie’s has sold Philip Johnson’s Rockefeller Guest House and Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale, and Sotheby’s has hammered down Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.

Breuer’s construction was the top lot in a sale of 590 objects that brought generally strong prices. The second highest bid was $180,000 (est. $180-220,000), for a Sonambient sound sculpture by Harry Bertoia. American midcentury design performed well: A 1960 George Nelson storage unit soared to $36,000 (est. $5,000-7,000), and Scandinavian furniture, long undervalued, showed signs of upward momentum, with a 1952 Arne Jacobsen desk earning $36,400 (est. $10-15,000).

Bigger design news, however, came at the London auctions one week later. Christie’s sale of Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge, 1986, a chaise from an edition of seven, for £748,500 ($1.5 million) — the steepest price fetched by a living designer — was among the record breakers. "The Wright Price" originally appeared in the December 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2007 Table of Contents.