🏠 The "Butterfly House" is for sale

One of the midcentury-modern gems of the Luella A. Anderson area hits the market this week, the first time the house has been for sale since it was built in 1960. 

Known alternately as the “Lang,” “Fritz,” or “Butterfly” house, the low-slung two-bedroom at 4736 Coffey Lane was designed by Herbert Fritz Jr., a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s set to draw scores of interested onlookers to its open house on Sunday, while neighbors and appreciators wait to see what a new buyer might have planned for the historic, but timeworn, house.

Background 

The Luella A. Anderson neighborhood began to take shape in the late 1950’s, when the University of Minnesota decided to sell a plot of land it had received as a donation near West River Parkway. The land ended up in the hands of developer Marvin Anderson, a Roosevelt grad who, as Andy Sturdevant recounts in the definitive history of the development, “dropped a little bit of GI Bill-styled suburbia right on the banks of the Mississippi" and named it after his wife.

The tangly mini-neighborhood was one of the last tracts of its size to be developed in Minneapolis. Its blank-slate sense of possibility attracted a number of people who wanted to swing for the fences with custom designs in the architectural styles of the day.