Frank Zappa’s Laurel Canyon Compound For Sale For $5.4 Million


Frank Zappa’s home for the last 25 years of his life is on the market. According to Billboard, the Laurel Canyon compound where Frank Zappa lived and recorded much of his music has been listed for sale by his four children for the bargain price of $5,495,000.

Frank Zappa and his family lived in the 8,000-square-foot Southern California compound, loacted on 7885 Woodrow Wilson Drive, from 1968 until the music legend’s death in 1993. The house boasts seven bedrooms, six bathrooms, two guest cottages, a swimming pool, and a rooftop tennis court.

The buyer of the Zappa family home will become the proud owner of Zappa’s legendary Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, named from Frank’s 1975 song “Muffin Man.” The famous in-home studio was the place where the jazz-rock musician recorded his many albums. The buyer also gets The Vault, the famous chamber beneath the house where Zappa stored the thousands of hours of unreleased recordings and artifacts that are currently being archived by documentary filmmaker Alex Winter. Unique features in the house include a door salvaged from a submarine.

This isn’t the first time this year Frank Zappa’s famous spread has been on the market this year. In March, Curbed reported that the Zappa compound was the prize for a unique Kickstarter campaign. The house was listed as the reward for anyone who kicked in $9 million to the campaign to fund filmmaker Alex Winter’s Frank Zappa documentary, Who the F*@% is Frank Zappa. The description for the house detailed all of the house’s amenities, including that famous subterranean vault and iconic recording studio space.

In an interview with the New York Times, Winter said the Zappa abode was “a bargain” at $9 million. The filmmaker explained that with the death of Frank’s widow, Gail Zappa, in 2015, no one used the house and it would have to be sold anyway.

“For the real giant Frank Zappa fans out there, they’re going to get the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, the house that has the vault in it and all this great history,” Winter said at the time.

The Kickstarter campaign ultimately reached its goal without the sale of the house, so now Frank Zappa fans can really get a bargain with a price tag that’s millions less than the original suggestion.

Frank Zappa’s compound was one of several rock and roll hotspots in Laurel Canyon during the neighborhood’s heyday back in the day. The Zappa compound on Woodrow Wilson Drive was just down the road from the gated Cape Cod owned by Cass Elliott of the Mamas and the Papas, which served as a haven for fellow musicians in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

In fact, according to Vanity Fair, many people say the eclectic Laurel Canyon music scene officially began when Frank Zappa moved to the neighborhood in the late 1960s. Joni Mitchell, who also lived in the musical neighborhood at the time, told Vanity Fair her house overlooked the Zappa property.

My dining room looked out over Frank Zappa’s duck pond, and once when my mother was visiting, three naked girls were floating around on a raft in the pond,” Mitchell said. “In the upper hills the Buffalo Springfield were playing, and in the afternoon there was just a cacophony of young bands rehearsing. At night it was quiet except for cats and mockingbirds. It had a smell of eucalyptus, and in the spring, which was the rainy season then, a lot of wildflowers would spring up. Laurel Canyon had a wonderful distinctive smell to it.”

Take a look at the video below to see a rare interview with Frank Zappa in his Laurel Canyon home.

[Photo by Ron Case/Keystone/Getty Images]

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