The $3.5 building is the only Neutra-designed commercial building left. (Dion Neutra)

The son of modernist Richard Neutra is looking for someone to buy and protect his father's last commercial building. It has been listed for sale for $3.5 million since November.

So far, Dion Neutra has had several offers, "but none that quite hit the nail on the head," he said in an e-mail. He insists that the National Register-listed building be sold with a protective conservation easement.

Built in 1950 as Neutra's office, the 4,800-square-foot building in Silver Lake, Calif., includes two apartments in the rear. Neutra wants to sell the building to establish an endowment to allow his Los Angeles-based Neutra Institute for Survial Through Design to continue.

"I'm hoping to find a suitable steward while I'm alive that would take care of the building into the foreseeable future," Neutra says. "I want to rehearse the placing of our conservation easement on the title and also get out of the landlord business." (A renter moved into the building on Mar. 1.)

Neutra (1892-1970), an Austrian architect who worked briefly with Frank Lloyd Wright, is perhaps best known for his 1946 Kaufman House in Palm Springs, Calif., and for his 1962 Gettysburg Cyclorama, which the National Park Service wants to demolish.

A conservation easement is crucial, Neutra says, because his father's work is disappearing. The new owners of the 1962 Samuel and Luella Maslon House in Rancho Mirage, Calif., demolished it in 2002.

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