For Sale: Beautiful Enigma - Page 2

"It was such a wonderful experience to see him walking through the house," says Girone. "He was such a humble, charming man, a real renegade."

Girone said he went down to check the steel underpinnings of the 1,955-square-foot house and commented wryly with a smile, "Son of a gun, I can't believe all these 'lies' I told so many years ago came true."

When Bethlehem Steel exec H. Harrison Fuller sold the house in 1962 without ever moving in, Gari and Renee Ketcham bought it and lived there the rest of their lives. It has been leased out for the past six years, but lightly used.

"We really didn't have to do much. We just staged it," says Girone, who also did a few interior touch-ups. Girone, who lives in an Eichler in nearby Terra Linda, was totally surprised when she first got word of the historic house, admitting, "I didn't even know it was here!"

"This is an exciting house," says Elliott, noting that every bedroom opens up to a deck with views of hillside vegetation and the Peacock Gap golf course. Elliott said she and the Ketcham family are hoping whoever buys it will build out Thorne's original plan, which called for a downstairs with swimming pool on the .87-acre lot.

But Elliott remains cautious. "We want to make sure a developer doesn't come in and knock it down and build two houses," she vowed. "I certainly feel it's an important architectural property."

But Beverley Thorne, one of the last architects commissioned for a Case Study House, is modest as ever about the Harrison House.

"It wasn't special for me. It was just one of those things," he said matter-of-factly recently. "We had a project to do, and we did it."

For more information on the Harrison House listing, click here.