JB Fung Closes the Gell-Mann Residence at 1024 Armada Drive in Pasadena for $4.6M
The Compass / Beyond Shelter agent closes Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann's 1956 William Blurock modern on the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena's Prospect Historic District.
JB Fung of Compass has closed the sale of 1024 Armada Drive in Pasadena for $4,600,000. The home closed on October 9, 2026.
Known as the Gell-Mann Residence, the house was designed in 1956 by California modernist William E. Blurock, FAIA. For more than two decades it was home to theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who joined the Caltech faculty in 1955, proposed the particles he named quarks and won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics, and to his wife, Josephine Margaret Dow Gell-Mann.
The house sits along the edge of the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena's Prospect Historic District, a National Register-listed neighborhood. Blurock answered the older Craftsman and period-revival homes around it with quiet massing, flagstone, stucco, a recessed entry and a second-story balcony.
Inside, he flipped the usual plan. The main living, dining and gathering rooms are upstairs, where they catch more daylight and look out through the tree canopy toward the Rose Bowl and the canyons. The living room has a soaring ceiling, a copper-clad fireplace and a long mid-century light fixture. Walnut and maple paneling, custom millwork and broad expanses of glass run through the house, and an open staircase with colored-glass inset panels, a wood-wrapped rail and cork floors links the two levels.
The lower level opens to a zen-style garden, a large swimming pool and a separate pool house that doubles as a guest studio. There are five bedrooms and five bathrooms on a lot of about 13,900 square feet.
For Fung, whose Beyond Shelter practice specializes in architect-designed homes across Los Angeles, it is a close that combines architecture, scientific history and one of Pasadena's most storied neighborhoods.
Closed sale. $2M+ in live markets only. Listing agents named as published. Source: Compass / Beyond Shelter listing; price per TheMLS and LA County public records. Photos: Courtesy Beyond Shelter. Luxury Price Drops is not a brokerage.