Issue Mar 27th 2024  March 27th 2024

This Is The Most Affordable Frank Lloyd Wright Home On The Market

Living in a Frank Lloyd Wright home is not always a low-cost pursuit. But if you’re looking in this market, it doesn’t get more affordable than the McCartney House, a 1950 Usonian home in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Priced at $790,000, it is currently the least expensive home on the market designed by Wright, according to Realtor. “The home, like many in the area, fell into a state of disrepair,” Fred Taber, who holds the listing, tells AD over email. The current owners, who bought the home in in 2021, took great care to fix it up and are now ready to pass the torch to the next steward.

The property is located within Parkwyn Village, a Wright-designed neighborhood that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2022. In 1946, a group of young families wrote to Wright, asking if he would consider designing a housing community for them. “We have just purchased a 47-acre site,” they explained, expressing hope to offer homes for 40 to 60 families priced between $5,000 and $20,000. The architect agreed to lay out roads and house sites, and drafted a plan that included 40 roughly-one-acre lots in addition to gardens, tennis courts, and playgrounds on the remaining seven acres. The visionary also designed four of the homes in the community, though many in the neighborhood today are inspired by Wright’s ideas and style.

The McCartney House, one of the four original homes, was built for Ward McCartney, a dentist, and his wife, Helen, who bought their lot in the early days of Parkwyn Village. “Your house is an experimental geometric form: a triangle, or several of them, almost a star. I hope you will enjoy living in it,” Helen, who wrote a short book about building and living in the home, remembers Wright saying when the couple visited Taliesin to collect the blueprints. The property was designed based on a four-foot parallelogram grid, with each wing shaped like a triangle and made from concrete blocks. The site spans 1,671 square feet and includes four bedrooms and two bathrooms.

“We were overwhelmed to be in the presence of a great man, and to be given such a gift,” Helen wrote. The couple never questioned the practicality of such a unique home either, she added. “Wright was the master, and we trusted him implicitly.” Included in the blueprints were also furniture designs, some of which are still in the house.

Click for more details: architecturaldigest.com  

Tim Totten To Share The Highs And Lows Of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Life And Career At ‘Let’s Be Frank, Perfectly Frank’

Timothy Totten is a master storyteller specializing in the life and work of famed American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Totten has studied the subject for more than 30 years and shares his unique presentations with audiences at museums, libraries, and universities across the country, as well as symposiums and events at Wright sites like Hollyhock House, Robie House, and Florida Southern College. In his upcoming Dana-Thomas House Foundation fundraiser titled “Let’s Be Frank, Perfectly Frank” on April 13 in Springfield, Illinois, Totten will weave a story of love, loss, and the Emperor of Japan as he recounts the personal triumphs and tragedies of the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Totten along with President of the Dana-Thomas House Foundation Cinda Klickna spoke to Community Voices about Wright’s tumultuous personal life and how he rebuilt his career in his later years.

For more information about the fundraiser visit this link.

Click for more details: nprillinois.org  

Wright's Futuristic Ellis Island Plan

The very words “Ellis Island” bring to mind a host of sepia-toned images, shaped by both American historical fact and national myth. Officers employed there really did inspect the eyelids of new arrivals with buttonhooks, for example, but they didn’t actually make a policy of changing their names, however foreign they sounded. You can learn this and much else besides by paying a visit to the National Immigration Museum on Ellis Island, which opened in 1990, 36 years after the closure of the immigrant inspection and processing station itself. But if Frank Lloyd Wright had had his way, you could live on Ellis Island — and what’s more, you’d never need to leave it.

“After Ellis Island was decommissioned in 1954 as the nation’s gateway to the world’s huddled masses, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) chose an all-American path: opening the site to developers,” write Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin at the Gotham Center for New York City History. When NBC radio and television announcer Jerry Damon and director Elwood Doudt pitched to Wright the ambitious idea of redeveloping the disused island into a “completely self-contained city of the future,” the architect replied that the project was “virtually made to order for me.” Alas, Wright died just before they could all meet and hammer out the details, but not before he’d drawn up a preliminary but vivid plan.

Damon and Doudt carried on with what the late Wright has named the “Key Project.” “Its Jules Verne-esque design, based on Wright’s sketches, was resolutely futuristic,” write Lubell and Goldin. A “circular podium” on the island would support “apartments for 7,500 residents, rising like a stack of offset, alternating dishes. Above these dwelling floors, and separated by sundecks, would be a crescent of seven corrugated, candlestick-shaped towers containing more apartments and a 500-room hotel.” At the center of it all, Wright placed “a huge globe, seemingly pockmarked by eons of meteor collisions, and held aloft by plastic canopies protecting the plazas below.”

It’s easy to imagine the execution of this Space Age urban utopia not quite living up to Wright’s vision — and, indeed, to imagine it having fallen by now into just as thorough a state of dilapidation as did Ellis Island’s original buildings. But it’s also fascinating to consider what could have been Wright’s final commission as the acme of the evolution of his thinking about the urban space itself. A quarter-century earlier, he’d been obsessed with the quasi-rural development he called Broadacre City; just a few years before his death, he came up with the Illinois Mile-High Tower, a megastructure that would practically have constituted a metropolis in and of itself. The Key Project, as Damon and Doudt promoted it, would have offered “casual, inspired living, minus the usual big-city clamor”: the kind of marketing language we hear from developers still today, though not backed by the genius of the most renowned architect in American history.

Click for more details: openculture.com  

This Tiny CT Airbnb Was Designed By Frank Lloyd Wright's Descendant

Christine Ingraham of Fletcher Cameron Design can envision order, line up elements in a room, and create a seamless flow when designing. Her proficiency in the design field comes as no surprise; after all, it's in her genealogy. She happens to be a great-granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright, who was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as "the greatest American architect."

"It's 100 percent in my blood," laughs Ingraham. "Plus, my parents were architects. I grew up in a design-oriented household. My brother, sisters, and I grew up understanding how to place things in a room, hang things on a wall, and arrange our spaces so they were beautiful and functional simultaneously."

Ingraham and her husband Greg Spiggle are the Principals of New Haven-based Fletcher Cameron Design, a modern kitchen and bath design company. So, when designing a 580-square-foot guest house on their property in Guilford in 2010, it was no surprise that they'd take a modern and minimal approach with clean lines and rich materials.

"The initial purpose of the house was for family and friends to stay when visiting," mentions Ingraham. "But three years later, it doubled as a modern Airbnb. It was perfect for guests looking for a private retreat."

Ingraham received her master's degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and in 1990, co-founded Fletcher Cameron Design with Spiggle, a designer and Yale School of Art graduate. Together, early in their careers, they developed a line of furniture and then expanded into designing corporate lobbies, interior spaces, kitchens, and baths.

In 1991, the design duo bought a house on 3 acres with a beautiful view of a vernal pond and surrounding trees. Almost 20 years later, they decided to design and build the guest house. They collaborated with two Yale architecture graduates on the structural challenge of building on a granite ledge.

According to Ingraham, they consciously decided to avoid pouring a foundation on the granite ledge and instead built the guest house on steel legs. While they had to do some clearing, they saved as much of the surrounding trees and foliage as possible. Spiggle built all the stone walls and planters using the excavated rock to make way for the house. In addition, sculptural elements are installed around the property and in the pond.

The exterior is painted a mustard yellow and designed with a cedar overhang and a deck with a stainless steel railing. Oversized sliding doors allow for maximum natural light and passive solar. The entry boasts an aluminum-covered door and durable, gray HardieBoard siding.

"We designed the interiors and built-in cabinetry," notes Spiggle. "People tend to like modern design when they go places — everything is more simplified."

Simple and elegant, the inside offers high ceilings, which make its small footprint feel larger. There's a front living room overlooking the pond; a modern bath with beautiful fixtures; a shower, wall-mounted toilet, heated slate floor, heated towel rack; and a large, private bedroom with a king-size bed.

The bathroom features teak cabinetry, and the kitchenette is bamboo. Instead of sheetrock, the walls are maple panels for easy maintenance without requiring painting. All the rugs are custom wool/silk woven by Tibetan weavers and designed by Marcia Weese Rugs. And Spiggle designed a carved screen and cafe table and chairs.

"A kitchenette is perfect for quick breakfasts and lunches," says Ingraham, who notes that they outfitted the space with an under-counter refrigerator, microwave, sink, hot water pot, French press, cups, glasses, plates, bowls, and flatware.

Located in a friendly, quiet neighborhood, the charming getaway offers rates between $200-$250 per night, depending on season and holiday, for two guests. Along with AC/heat, the guest house is equipped with TV, bedding, towels, Wifi, an outdoor fire pit, and grill. Guests enter via a private driveway, with parking included, to what Ingraham and Spiggle call the Garden of Eden. The setting offers countless examples of nature's abundance, from birds singing to frogs croaking and owls hooting.

"We generally book weekends and full weeks in the summer," says Ingraham. "It's a great little place where you can unwind and recharge your batteries or use it as a home base to explore all that Guilford and its neighboring towns have to offer, including the Connecticut beaches."

For this reason, guests from around the world grace the steps of this Airbnb all months of the year. It's walking distance to a shell beach, biking along the shore, hiking trails, and a short drive to picturesque Stony Creek in Branford, Hammonasset Beach State Park and Meig's Point Nature Center in Madison, and the historic Guilford Town Green with a plethora of shops and restaurant options.

"I can't believe we've been renting out the guest house for 10 years now," says Ingraham. "It's stood the test of time. The design has stayed fresh and appropriate, like all our work. Plus, people always want to get away, even if just for a night, to escape their everyday lives."

Click for more details: ctinsider.com