Rare IM Pei Designed Fort Worth Estate Hits Market

A trophy home with museum-level pedigree is testing the upper limits of Fort Worth’s luxury market.

One of the only known private homes designed by the late I.M. Pei hit the market for $22 million, instantly becoming the priciest publicly listed home in Fort Worth. The Wall Street Journal reported that the 1969 estate was commissioned by oil heiress Anne Burnett Tandy and her husband, retail executive Charles Tandy, and has remained in the family for more than five decades.

The roughly 19,000-square-foot mansion sits on about 4 acres in the exclusive Westover Hills enclave and is the largest of the few private homes Pei is known to have designed. Best known for global landmarks like the Louvre Pyramid, as well as more local ones such as the current Dallas City Hall. Pei rarely took on residential commissions, making the listing a rarity in both architectural and real estate circles, according to the outlet. The home is listed by Ashley Mooring of Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty.

The mansion was built with entertainment in mind. Pei once described the estate as creating a home suitable for “two people — or two or three hundred,” he said in an interview with House and Garden magazine in 1970. The result is a sprawling layout that includes seven bedrooms, three kitchens, multiple living and dining spaces, two climate-controlled wine cellars and a dedicated art gallery.

Its defining feature is a dramatic garden room capped by a sloping steel-and-glass ceiling, filtered through a wood lattice that softens natural light — a hallmark of Pei’s geometric, light-driven design approach, according to the publication. The grounds add to the estate feel, with a pool and putting green rounding out the amenities.

The property’s lineage also adds to its mystique. After Charles Tandy’s death in 1978 and Anne Tandy’s in 1980, the estate remained with the family, later serving as the home of Anne Marion, a prominent philanthropist, until her death in 2020.

While $22 million is a stretch for Fort Worth, brokers are betting the combination of scarcity, provenance and scale will resonate beyond local demand, according to the outlet, drawing interest from national and international buyers, even in markets not typically associated with ultra-luxury pricing.

Pei, who died in 2019 at 102 and won the Pritzker Prize in 1983, is believed to have designed just two other private homes in the U.S., one that is still in his family in Katonah, New York, and the William L. Slayton House in Washington, D.C., according to the publication.

— Eric Weilbacher