Brad Pitt buys UFO-shaped house in Catalonia and moves it to California

US actor Brad Pitt bought a UFO-shaped 50 square meter house in a northern town of Catalonia, Sant Climent Sescebes, and moved it to California, as it has been made public recently and Catalan News was able to confirm.

Pitt brought the Xasteros House, a fiberglass "rarity" with no more than ten examples ever manufactured and designed by the Greek architect after 1967, when he founded the company Plastidomiki Athens with the idea of manufacturing light, prefabricated fiberglass houses.

He died in Athens in 1988, but one of his creations came back to life in 2023 at Terra Remota, a vineyard in Sant Climent Sescebes, near Jonquera, where the Perpignan-based design dealer, Clément Cividino, exhibited the refurbished piece, and from where actor Brad Pitt bought the Xasteros House.

The sale was very discreet as the sale took place between August and September last year, and it was not reported until June this year during the presentation of the new house, the Tropical Pavilion at Terra Remota.

Pitt moved the house during the last quarter of 2024 in two big containers, as the ceiling had been divided into two parts and the walls into three sections. He moved the house to Los Angeles in California, where he stores several previous architectural acquisitions.

Cividino highlighted in a written statement that the Xasteros House, "purely in terms of aesthetics, is the most beautiful house ever made from plastic."

The French-based design dealer received a message from a friend with a photo of an abandoned Xasteros House in Greece, and despite the fact that he "already knew about the design because I’d seen some images of it on the internet, he contacted a Greek lawyer in Paris to see "if it would be possible to track down the owner of the plot on which it stood, which is near the coast at Kalyvia Thorikou, 45 minutes to the southest of Athens. 

But nothing happened, and then Covid-19 hit, so he had to put things "on hold for a while."

After traveling to Greece and looking for the house's owner, he recalls seeing it as a "total wreck. It was like an open-air dustbin", full of old bottles, and people had regularly used it over the years.

Terra Remota

Clément Cividino is a regular at Terra Remota, as he has already shown some pieces such as Georges Candilis' 'Hexacubes', a 'Six-Shell Bubble House' by Jean-Benjamin Maneval, and a former Total service station imagined by Jean Prouvé.

Currently, he is showing Ferdinand Fillod's Tropical Pavilion, a 90 sqm house with a 30 sqm terrace, and its built with a series of steel arches, onto which slanted panels are clipped abd bolted, some of which have openings for doors and windows.

The Tropical Pavilion has a double roof structure that allows better ventilation. For decades, it was used by the French national telecommunications firm, France Télécom, as the Marseille offices.

"All the experts in my field were aware there was [a Tropical Pavilion] in France, but nobody knew where," Cividino said in a statement.