Pieces of famed architect’s Coral Gables masterpiece home to be auctioned before demolition

Original pieces of a landmark Coral Gables house by famed Florida architect Alfred Browning Parker, including custom-designed wood furnishings, doors and carved wall panels, are being auctioned off at bargain-basement prices amid a local and national furor over an effort by a buyer who paid $36 million for the home to demolish it.

The online auction, which ends Sunday, has come as a second shock to preservationists, architects and Parker family members who have appealed to the buyer, identified as Texas construction industry mogul Felix Sorkin, to reconsider his decision to destroy what’s widely regarded as a South Florida modern architectural masterpiece and one of the prolific architect’s best designs.

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They say the auction only worsens the blow. .Neither Sorkin nor a Miami attorney listed in public records as the property trustee have responded to letters or public appeals from a Parker family foundation and preservation and architectural organizations. Parker, renown for his “organic,” environmentally attuned approach to architecture, designed and built the sprawling waterfront house, in the city’s Gables Estates section, for his family in 1963.

Suggested bids for the 77 auction items are as little as $20 and no more than $600, but as of Friday afternoon had drawn only a handful of bids totaling less than $2,000.

“It blows my mind,” the late Parker’s daughter, Lebritia Parker Kendrick, who lived in the house as a young girl, said of the auction. “What is this? It makes no sense to me. It’s almost like a slap.”

Original features of home to be auctioned

News of the impending demolition has provoked consternation among architects and preservationists across the country. In a letter to the Miami Herald, leaders of the American Institute of Architects’ Florida and Miami chapters called the owner’s decision “incomprehensible as well as unforgivable.”

Parker Kendrick and brothers Robin Parker and Quentin Parker confirmed that many of the items being auctioned are original features of the house, including a floating mahogany-frame sofa attached to a wall at one end. Quentin Parker, a California architect, said he helped his father, who acted as general contractor on the house’s construction and designed and oversaw every detail, bolt the table in place.

The items also include wall panels, doors and built-in furnishings made of rare Honduran mahogany, which can no longer be obtained, made by carpenter and woodworker Bill Shogren, a frequent Parker collaborator. Several elaborately carved panels from the house’s master bedroom were salvaged from a bank building by his father, Quentin Parker said.

It’s unclear whether it’s Sorkin or his demolition contractor who is selling off the pieces. A contact listed on the Pompano Beach D Auction Company’s website said Friday he was not authorized to discuss the auction or disclose the firm’s client.

But Parker Kendrick said she found it ironic that the online auction page boasts that the house is an architectural masterwork while also calling it “a teardown.” The family of late Coral Gables socialite and philanthropist Mary Jean “Bunny” Bastian, who owned it for decades, put the house up for sale last year after her death.

Kendrick said that neither Sorkin, attorney Alex Almazan or Gables city officials have responded to letters from a family foundation asking that the demolition effort be frozen to give advocates a chance to make a case for the house’s preservation.

Outcry over plans to tear down home

“It’s in perfectly good condition,” she said of the house, which her father sold in the mid-1960s after the college-age and young adult kids began moving out. “I was really hoping I could get a response from Mr. Sorkin’s attorney, which was optimistic. I was curious why he’s doing this. Why tear down a landmark that’s part of South Florida culture and history? I would like to know his thinking.

“People come from all over to see that house. It’s in books, in magazines, and in a new documentary that is getting national distribution in January. There is such an outcry over this purchase and over what this man is doing, but I have not been able to get any response. I just think it’s disrespectful, the auction just being another one of those pieces of disrespect. It’s very sad.”

Still, Parker Kendrick said she hoped someone would bid on important museum-quality pieces and donate them to her father’s alma mater, the University of Florida, where he also taught for many years at the end of his 60-year career, or to the University of Miami. Quentin Parker said he may bid on some pieces to preserve at least a piece of his father’s masterwork for posterity.

Coral Gables has yet to approve a demolition permit for the house. On Friday, a city website listed the permit application as “in review.” The city denied the permit last week, but that was only because of a technical issue having to do with the required capping of water lines. a city spokesman said.

The city, a bastion of historic preservation, has said it’s powerless to block demolition because of a 2022 state law that bars designation as protected landmarks of houses that sit at or below defined flood elevations in federally designated high-risk zones, as the Parker home does. That means the demolition permit is likely to be approved without a review by the city preservation office, ordinarily a routine matter under by city ordinance.

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Parker family members and architects familiar with the house note that Parker designed the house with forward-looking features aimed at blunting the force of wind and water in hurricanes, including angled columns and an open “seaway” on the ground floor that allows storm surge to flow through the structure. The house was unscathed by Hurricane Camille in 1965, when the Parker family was still living there, and has easily survived subsequent major storms, including Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

It not only received numerous architectural awards, but also prizes from the American Concrete Institute and other construction industry groups, Quentin Parker said. The family hopes that will appeal to Sorkin, whose General Technologies company outside Houston makes devices for concrete reinforcement.

For $36 million, Quentin Parker suggested, there is plenty Sorkin could buy on the same street to tear down that is of no architectural significance.

“I feel strongly that architecture itself is very temporary, but this is a house that should be preserved,” he said. “It’s not just a cultural expression, it is a stalwart of organic architecture, an icon of art that we created. If you were to preserve that, it would pay itself off in time. You would leave a cultural statement.”