Wilt Chamberlain’s custom-built house in the Bel Air hills has come up for sale. The asking for the contemporary is $19 million, but the price includes all associated mythology.

Which is considerable. The Olympian parties that must’ve been launched here in the 1970’s boggle the imagination.

Apart from being the site of more than a few legendary gatherings, the home has another reason for being significant: it’s an architectural gem representing the end of the late period of modern design, as it moved into contemporary.

The 7,158 square-foot house sits on a little less than 2.6 acres of land. The Stilt had it custom designed and built in 1971. He’d purchased the lot a few years earlier for what was, in the late 1960’s, a considerable sum: $125K.

The house contains five bedrooms. But a look at the home begins with the gate, which features pilasters inset with triangular pieces of colored glass; marvelously evocative of the period’s emphasis on individual expression. The motif is picked up in the residence, and used to grandly emphasize the roofline, and then the home’s interior, as none other than Chamberlain’s place.

Inside? More ornamental cut glass, stone, timber, some steel. The home features wildly dramatic buttresses that begin in the center of the roof and extend into the earth around it, giving it a profound feeling of connection to the land. Interior/exterior demarcation is nicely blurred by walkways and water features, giving the home a naturalistic feel by way of Japanese home design.

Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a single game, and he remains the only NBA player to date to achieve the feat.