This place is such a novelty said Roden

This place is such a novelty,” said Roden.But it will be for the earlier work, the designs that mixed Italian, French and even Moorish styles, for which Neff will be best remembered and which remain the most sought after. It was perhaps those homes too, of which Neff was most proud himself.His structural engineer for many years, George Brandon, once recalled how Neff was in the habit of driving around Beverly Hills with friends and acquaintances, suddenly stopping the car and declaring, “That’s one of my houses. The idea was to produce affordable and practical homes as demand for housing soared after the Second World War.These balloon homes were also built in South Africa, Pakistan, West Africa and Brazil. All the best land was gone 50 years ago and that is one of the reasons why so many of his houses remain and that they have not been knocked down and replaced with something “better”.”As an architect Neff was not only interested in building houses for the rich and famous.

In the 1940s and 1950s he turned his attention to prefabricated homes and developing “balloon homes” for the government which involved pouring concrete over a large industrial strength balloon and then deflating the balloon once the concrete had set. Neff, 75, has written a study of his father’s work and continues to collect details on the more than 500 houses he built in California. His father kept no proper records, so, even today, Neff Jnr is making new discoveries. “Just last week I was contacted by someone who is refurbishing a house that my father built,” he reports. “They want me to go over and take a look at it.”Neff has not seen inside Pitt and Anniston’s house since they bought it but he says it “reeks of beauty and elegance … It was built for Fredric March and his wife and they loved it They lived there until they died To me, it’s about the most beautiful house …

father was so talented, nothing would surprise me but that house is low-key magnificence… I have heard that Jennifer Anniston may keep it.”Neff says his father was a quiet and reserved man – he routinely dressed in black wing-tip shoes, a black suit, white shirt and an unpatterned black tie – but was blessed with tremendous imagination and vision. He was also very popular with the people he was building homes for. “He just cleaned up,” he says.Crosby Doe, an expert on Neff’s work and a partner of Mossler, Deasy & Doe real estate, another firm in Beverly Hills, says that Neff’s houses – the one on Ridgedale Drive included – have a sense of humanity about them. “The reason they are so popular today is the creativity and quality involved – they were the high water-mark,” he says. “At least in California terms they represented a style of living which is still very much sought after and cannot be replicated.”Neff, he says, was a master not only of design but also at choosing a site for a property – one that afforded wonderful views or offered its owners the privacy they craved.