Charles Tandy marked his 60th birthday by riding an elephant around the driveway courtyard at 1400 Shady Oaks Lane, his wife Anne beside him. It is the kind of detail that only surfaces once a house re-enters public conversation, the way this one did this spring when it listed for $22 million, the most expensive home ever publicly offered in Fort Worth. What most of that coverage leaves out is that the party wasn't held in the first house built on that hilltop. It was held in the second.
The house making headlines now, the one architecture writers keep calling I.M. Pei's only significant residential work in Texas, replaced something else entirely. And what it replaced tells you more about how Westover Hills actually operates than the Pei name does.
The House Nobody Mentions in the Listing
In 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a home called Crownfield on that same parcel, commissioned by Anne Burnett, then married to her first husband, Robert Windfohr, according to the architectural archive usmodernist.org. Crownfield stood on the property for two decades. It does not stand there now. What occupies 1400 Shady Oaks Lane today is entirely a Pei building, completed in 1969, the same year Anne remarried.
Nobody selling the current house talks about Crownfield, and that omission is itself the story. A neighborhood built on the premise of permanence quietly let go of a Frank Lloyd Wright commission to make room for someone's next chapter.
A Different Architect for the Same Client
Anne divorced Windfohr and married Charles Tandy, the Tandy Corporation executive, in 1969. Rather than renovate or keep Crownfield, the couple commissioned Pei, whose résumé already included the kind of institutional work that would later produce the Louvre pyramid and Dallas City Hall. Pei accepted only three private residential commissions in his career. This was the last of them, and by most measures the largest.
Pei explained his brief in a 1970 interview with House and Garden, describing what Anne actually needed from the house:
"Mrs. Tandy loves parties, and she gives them very often, so she wanted lots of space."
The scale had to work for an intimate dinner or a crowd in the hundreds, and Pei drew on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston for the design, a central courtyard ringed by gallery-like rooms. The house's garden room, described by the Wall Street Journal as having a sloping steel-and-glass ceiling and a wood-lattice sunscreen, became its signature space. It is architecture built explicitly for entertaining, not for permanence as its own virtue.
What the Building Was Actually For
Here is the pattern worth noticing: neither house on this lot was ever really about the house. Crownfield existed to serve a marriage and a social calendar. Westover House existed to serve a different marriage and the same social calendar, scaled up. Over its life the home hosted weddings, debutante balls, fundraising dinners for presidential campaigns, and Tandy's elephant-assisted 60th birthday. The architecture changed. The function, entertaining at a scale that required an architect of Pei's caliber to solve for, did not.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to understand what actually defines Westover Hills as a neighborhood. It isn't a museum district where houses get preserved because of who designed them. Families here build and rebuild around what the current generation needs, and a Wright commission from 1949 wasn't sacred enough to survive a remarriage twenty years later. We've written before about the range of architectural styles that show up block to block in Westover Hills, and this house is a clean example of why that range exists. Continuity here runs through families, not through buildings.
What Actually Stayed in the Family
Anne Burnett Tandy, the granddaughter of ranching magnate Samuel Burk Burnett, whose name is carried by the town of Burkburnett, had inherited the family's 6666 Ranch, which was later sold to a group that included screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. After Tandy died in 1978 and Anne Burnett Tandy died in 1980, the house passed to her daughter from her first marriage, Anne Burnett Marion, who lived there until her own death in 2020. Marion went on to found the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, chair Burnett Ranches and Burnett Oil, serve on TCU's Board of Trustees, and support both the Kimbell Art Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
What survived across three owners and two marriages was not a specific structure. It was a family's continued grip on the property and on Fort Worth's cultural institutions. Compare the two houses directly:
- Crownfield: Frank Lloyd Wright, completed 1949, commissioned by Anne Burnett Windfohr and Robert Windfohr. Does not survive.
- Westover House: I.M. Pei, completed 1969, commissioned by Anne Burnett Tandy and Charles Tandy. Still standing, and on the market for the first time in 2026.
One generation's architecture became the next generation's teardown. The family endured. The building did not, at least not the first one.
The First Time in 57 Years
That is what makes the current listing genuinely historic, more than the $22 million price tag or the Pei name. This house has never before been offered for sale. Fifty-seven years of continuous ownership by one family, through two deaths and one inheritance, ends the moment this listing closes. Ashley Mooring, Madeline Jobst, and Ralph Randall hold the listing, and the price makes it the most expensive home publicly listed in Fort Worth's history, but the real break with the past is that nobody in the family is choosing to build the next chapter here. For the first time since Anne Burnett first put an architect to work on this hilltop, the decision about what happens to the property will be made by someone outside the family.
If you live in Westover Hills, that is the part worth sitting with. This is a neighborhood where the biggest houses are not artifacts to be protected so much as tools their owners reshape on their own timeline, sometimes trading one legendary architect for another without ceremony. The privacy hedges and the acreage that make Westover Hills what it is exist to give families room to make exactly that kind of decision without an audience. A Frank Lloyd Wright commission gave way here once, quietly, because a family decided it needed something else. That is not a footnote. It is close to the whole story of how this neighborhood actually works.
For more on the neighborhood itself, our Westover Hills guide covers what else defines the area beyond its most famous address.
If you're weighing a decision about a Westover Hills property of your own, whether that means building new, renovating, or understanding what a home like this is actually worth in today's market, John Zimmerman Group works this neighborhood every day. Work With Us.
