The Los Angeles family home of Ray Bradbury, who thought it imperative that humans leave Earth, has just been put on the market at a cool $1.495 million. From Carolyn Kellogg at the Los Angeles Times:
“His three-bedroom, 2500-square-foot house, built in 1937, is painted a cheery yellow. It has three bathrooms, hardwood floors, and sits on a generously sized 9,500-square-foot lot. It is loaded with original details, the sort that were part of the texture of the author’s daily life.
‘I’m surrounded by my metaphors,’ he explained in a 2001 video shot in the house’s converted basement, which was crammed with books and ephemera. ‘I realized, all this ‘junk’ here, I couldn’t live without.’
Around 1960, Bradbury and his wife, Maggie, bought the house in Cheviot Hills for a few reasons: Their family was growing, Bradbury was making more money writing, and it had the kind of space writers crave.
‘Ray has saved everything since his first birthday,’ Maggie told The Times in 1985. ‘I try to throw out newspapers and magazines and whatever can be thrown out. Ray is a pack rat. He refuses to let anything go. When we bought our house 25 years ago, it had a large basement, and that was the irresistible ingredient, because we needed a place where Ray could store everything he refuses to throw away.’
For many years, Bradbury kept an office in Beverly Hills where he wrote (and sometimes napped). When he got older, he used the basement space in Cheviot Hills to write. ‘I feel very comfortable here,’ he said in another 2001 video clip.”
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A peek inside Bradbury’s office, 1968:
