A modernist home tucked into St. Louis Park’s Westwood Hills neighborhood has hit the market for the first time in nearly 50 years, and it comes with a feature few buyers will find on any other listing: a working Cold War-era bomb shelter, complete with a venting pipe still visible on the side of the house. The four-bedroom, three-bathroom property at 1676 Virginia Ave S is listed for $899,000.
The home was designed in 1962 by architect Leonard Parker, according to a 1961 building permit that listed Dr. Harold Wexler as the original owner, as reported by the Minnesota Star Tribune. The 2,895-square-foot house sits on a 16,988-square-foot lot and features a 17-foot ceiling, an open-floor concept, three terrazzo areas, an indoor rock garden, an open-riser staircase, three balconies, brick patios and a retro-style wet bar. It was even featured in a 1966 issue of Better Homes & Gardens, per the Star Tribune’s reporting.
Listing agent Michael Lynch of Lakes Sotheby’s International Realty described the house as impeccably maintained, telling the paper that the use of brick and terrazzo warms the modernist structure and that the home remains functional for today’s buyers. Lynch, who has handled just three or four houses with bomb shelters in his 30 years in real estate, said such intact examples are increasingly rare finds on the market.
A Bomb Shelter Turned Ski and Wine Cellar
The shelter itself traces back to the anxieties of the early Cold War. President John F. Kennedy promoted civil defense shelters in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis followed the next year, a period that spurred a wave of private fallout shelter construction across American suburbs, according to MPR News. Dr. Wexler, the physician who commissioned the home and later served as chief of staff at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis before it closed in 1991, had the shelter built into the house at that same moment of national unease…