A Frank Lloyd Wright House

My house was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright.  But of course the dirty little secret of designing the fifties was that people couldn’t decide between Wright’s organic architecture with its earth tones and natural materials and another style called atomic which featured wildly bright primary colors and sputnik inspired fixtures.  So, like Winnie the Pooh when asked if he wanted jam or honey said, “Both.” Hence we bought a house with pink and turquoise, gold and green  bathrooms and a hot pink kitchen.  Amazingly, after restoring and creating a lot of organic features, the modern house has made a comeback  and now people on HGTV order designers to do Wrightian stuff like “open concept” but hardly know his reasoning for this. 

            The open concept was a way to save wasted space of long hallways and to achieve a sense of large size.  Older homes had divided rooms—dining, kitchen, den, living.  Open concept usually used a dining room or family room to feed traffic through without a hallway.  The openness gave a sense of grand space to an otherwise boxy little 1000 square foot house, like  the ones built in 1950.  Moreover, Wright had a motive.  He used the idea of having low ceiling halls or entries that opened into a large, expansive space. It gives the large space even more Wow when you discover it after going through a small entry.  And the large living space often had big windows, especially floor-to-ceiling windows  that seemed to let nature come into the house. Planters outside and planters inside made the inside seem outdoors and the outside come in.  This has become a stylistic point of many homes  built today even though they may be traditional with large Palladian windows.  Wright also created the picture window, an expanse of glass surrounded by two operable windows.  In the 50s many people had no air conditioning and having the two operable windows was important.  Often he would design a repeated design into a window—stained glass or dividing wood canes. A corollary of this glass and nature idea was an atrium for plants  combined with patio outside and more plants.  People in the 50s were often in love with yards and plantings, unlike today when a lot of folks can hardly grow a tomato. But as late as the 1930s half of US population lived on farms.

            In the midst of rooms was often something of almost sculptural beauty, a divider, a light fixture from the ceiling or a bookcase.  Hence Wright designed furniture to match a house.  Everything seen has importance, a design concept used by virtually every interior designer today. Our little place has cantilevered shelves of spalted oak and a canarywood fireplace mantle over a cut-stone fireplace with niche for the wood. And in order to make the house fit the environment, stone, rough sawn woods, bamboo, and cork floors were often used. 

            Wright’s organic architecture used flat roofs and cantilevered rooms that were designed to blend with nature, quite the contrast to today’s homes where roofs are as high as possible in order to declare the importance of the owners.  Landscaping was vital in order to make the blend with the land work well.  Japanese house styles were mimicked with bonsai trees and stones and gravel beds to imitate nature’s stream beds.  There was also the importance of view, both small and large in every house.  People didn’t live with the drapes down.  They knew their neighbors well, but America had begun to relinquish the idea that one sits out on the porch at night until after dark. Instead the concept of patio and garden with trellis and gates replaced it.  I suppose a lot of people would think we are nuts in recreating this, slaving over a yard and garden just to be able to sit in it.  But there are times when it rains or the sun catches the wisteria or the trees thrash in the wind when it becomes magical. 

          

             My mother was an interior designer and I guess some of it rubbed off on me.  Shirley learned fast and together we have made a fortune on flipping and renting properites in this small town.  We recently remodelled a little ranch rental and the realtor was enthralled at what we had done.  He put a price on it that was nearly double what we gave a few years ago. Flabbergasted me.  "It will sell within a week," he told us.  Wrong.  It had an offer but the banker takes at least a month to get a note done.