Frank Gehry is largely remembered as an architect of grand scale, known for his playful designs of some of the world’s most celebrated buildings: the Vitra Museum in Germany, the Guggenheim in Spain, the Disney Hall in Los Angeles. Gehry, who died last week at age 96, pioneered a style of swooping forms collaged together in ways that had seemed impossible. He found inspiration in the curves of fish, broken guitars and the folds of human arms.

But amid all the flash and fame, one early masterpiece is often forgotten: his own home in Santa Monica, Calif., a humble pink bungalow he bought in 1977 and transformed into an early Deconstructivist icon. Initially with just $50,000, Gehry made unexpected use of chain-link fencing, plywood and cinder blocks — the kinds of cheap materials he might have found as a boy in his grandfather’s hardware store in Toronto.

“Before all the celebrity and the glamorous projects, it was the stuff of everyday life that made him a really groundbreaking architect,” said Brian Goldstein, an architectural historian at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia and the author of “The Roots of Urban Renaissance.”

In the late 1970s, Gehry and his new wife, Berta Aguilera, were living in an apartment in Santa Monica. When Aguilera became pregnant with their second child, they decided they needed a house and found a two-story bungalow on a corner lot for $160,000. It had been built in the 1920s and had asbestos shingles. Gehry would later call it both a “dumb little house with charm” and a “sweet little house that everyone in the neighborhood liked.”

He had the idea to build “a new house around the old house,” he told the author Barbara Isenberg in her 2009 book “Conversations With Frank Gehry.”

The couple didn’t have much money back then, but Gehry got to work. He surrounded the structure with corrugated steel and added chain-link fencing that looked as if it was growing from the top. Glass protruded at odd angles. An aqua-colored cinder-block wall enclosed the lawn. Inside, the kitchen floor was made of asphalt.

The house-within-a-house had two front doors; a person could be both inside and outside at once. The architect Philip Johnson told The Times in 1982 that what made the house great “is if you’re in the new dining room and somebody looks out of the window of the old house, and you say, ‘Gee, I thought I was in the house, but now I see I’m outside, and that person is looking at me out the window.’”

He added, “It’s not beauty or ugliness either, but a disturbing kind of satisfaction that you don’t get in anyone else’s spaces, not any architect in the world.”

In the end, the house looked like something a hardware store had thrown up. No suburb had seen anything like it. “The neighbors got really pissed off,” Gehry said in a 2021 interview. One of them even tried to sue.

But for Gehry, the house represented creative freedom at a time when he didn’t have unlimited funds. There was no client to please, no deadlines to meet. He shrugged off his neighbors’ complaints and carried along. “I can’t stand the hypocrisy of a situation where every house on the street has a camper or a truck or a boat parked in front, but when a guy comes along and puts up some chain link, they raise holy hell,” he told The Times in 1982.

Whatever the neighborhood thought of it, the project and the confusion it caused put Gehry on the scene as a mischievous, fresh-eyed talent. The architectural historian Beatriz Colomina called it “the house that built Gehry.” It was a rejection of conventional forms and lines, revealing the nonconformist flair that would propel Gehry to fame in the decades to come.

But the building wasn’t just a statement. Gehry and his family lived there for decades, and as their domestic lives unfolded he wasn’t precious about altering it as new needs arose.

“I wanted a window in the bathroom, so I took a hammer and punched a hole in the ceiling with the hammer,” he told Ms. Isenberg in her 2009 book. “Then I put a piece of glass on the outside roof with heavy sealant so it would stay and so it wouldn’t leak. That became the bathroom window. It was done like that.”

In the 1990s, when he had more money, Gehry renovated the house again, adding a pool and updating the roof, lights and electrical system. “A lot was done that unraveled that old house, and I lost it,” he said in the book. “The house now has vestigial reminders of the old strength, but it’s not as good a house. It’s not as good a piece of art, if you want to call it art, as it was on the first go-round.”

Later in life, Gehry moved to a new house in Santa Monica that he designed with his son, Sam. But the Gehry-warped pink bungalow still stands as a crucial part of his oeuvre, and as an act of architectural rebellion.

“As much as it was a project of questioning the very nature of houseness,” Mr. Goldstein said, “it was also a project of questioning elitism and the notion that one needed to stand above to make a great work.”