A New Buyer Appears for a Threatened Wright House Joshua Lott for The New York Times An anonymous buyer has agreed to pay $2.379 million for this 1952 Frank Lloyd Wright house in Phoenix. PHOENIX - The coiled concrete-and-steel house built by Frank Lloyd Wright here, which had been under threat of demolition since its sale in June to a pair of luxury home developers, may have found its savior in an anonymous buyer who has agreed to pay the asking price of $2.379 million, all of it in cash. The agreement, struck late on Wednesday, offers exactly what preservationists, elected officials and the Wright family have fought so diligently to accomplish: It keeps the house from being razed. It is, however, only the first step in a transaction that needs to withstand the scrutiny of a home inspection and the volatile relationship between the city and the current owners, who have vociferously opposed the city's efforts to give the house landmark status. On Thursday, Mayor Greg Stanton pledged to stay the course, saying, "We're going to ensure the house is designated historic, as it should be." The push to sell the house began almost as soon as it was purchased by Steve Sells and John Hoffman, partners in 8081 Meridian, a development company. Once they had a permit to split the lot, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, based in Chicago, intervened, asking the city to consider turning the house into a landmark, which would protect it for three years. The City Council is scheduled to vote on the designation on Nov. 7. Councilman Sal DiCiccio, who represents Arcadia, the neighborhood where the house is located, said he wanted to hear from the new buyer first. "We don't want to be in a position of dictating what should happen to the property," he said. Mr. Stanton said he was going to work to keep the vote on the calendar or, if the date changed, "not too far in the future." Mr. Sells and Mr. Hoffman paid $1.8 million for the house three years after it had been sold by Wright's great-granddaughters for $2.8 million. One of them, Anne Wright-Levi, who spent much of her childhood at the home, built by Wright for her grandparents, said the heirs had no other choice, given the cost of maintaining the house, which none of them could have afforded on their own. Ms. Wright-Levi said the house needed about $300,000 worth of restoration. "There were bills to pay, there were taxes that had to be paid, there were things that had to be done, but the money wasn't there to maintain it," she said. They sold the house, she said, "knowing that the buyers would follow through in what they had promised to do, to preserve the house." A change in circumstances forced those buyers to sell it, which is how 8081 Meridian came into the picture. Janet Halstead, executive director of the Wright building conservancy, said that over the summer, when the house was listed for $2.1 million, the conservancy brought forth one potential buyer who made three offers, but all of them were rejected. The group played no role in Wednesday's agreement, which she said had left her "cautiously optimistic." Ms. Halstead added, "We won't know if the house will be saved from the threat of demolition and irresponsible development until we know the intentions of the new owners." The prospective buyer does not want his name revealed until the sale is final, a process that could take three weeks, said Robert Joffe of Russ Lyon Sotheby's, a broker working on the deal. The other broker is Johnathon De Young, also of Sotheby's. "He's doing this not for notoriety but for the love of the property," Mr. Joffe said. That's really the kind of person that we needed.