Issue Jul 31st 2024  July 31st 2024

The Story Behind The Frank Lloyd Wright House In Alexandria

Finding affordable housing in the Washington region is a challenge today, but it’s not a new challenge. The Pope-Leighey House at Woodlawn, designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is a unique example of 1940s, intentionally designed affordable living.

In 1939, journalist Loren Pope, a 28-year-old copy editor at the now-defunct Washington Evening Star newspaper, was earning $50 a week and wanted to build a modest house on his Falls Church lot. Pope was fascinated with Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect who was designing houses that today would cost around $650,000, far out of Pope’s price range.

Pope and his wife Charlotte envisioned spending $5,500, equal to about $86,000 today. In 1936 Wright had written, “The house of moderate cost is not only America’s major architectural problem but the problem most difficult for her major architects.”

So Lauren sent Wright a six-page letter with an “ask”: “There are certain things a man wants during life, and, of life. Material things and things of the spirit. It is for a house created by you. I feel that you are the great creative force of our time. Will you create a house for us? Will you?”

In 15 days, Wright responded, “Of course. I’m ready to give you a house.”

Lauren and Charlotte Pope ended up paying $7,000, including the furniture and the architect’s fee. “My last resort,” Pope recounted later in an interview with the National Building Museum, “was the Evening Star, which financed homes for its employees. The Star offered to lend me $5,700, to be taken out of my pay at $12 a week.”

The 1,200 square foot house, built in 1940 and 1941 on their 1.3-acre lot and now located at Woodlawn, 10 miles south of the City of Alexandria, is an example of Wright’s 100 or so Usonian houses built between 1936 and 1959. (Wright died in 1959.) It is one of only three Wright-designed houses in the Commonwealth. These homes were designed to be efficient, functional and affordable for middle-income people.

“The Usonian house was intended to provide a radically rethought, partially shop-built, inexpensive yet sublime dwelling for the middle-income American family. Wright wanted to make these houses affordable to all who owned land by maximizing the use of readily available, local building materials,” wrote Steven M. Reiss in his 2014 book, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House.”

The horizontal line was Wright’s recurring architectural theme for this house: A flat, cantilevered roof, a horizontal siding pattern and windows and doors clustered in horizontal bands. Even screw heads were often “turned to be horizontal,” wrote Reiss.

From the carport, visitors take a few steps down through an entryway to an L-shaped, one-story house and into an open combined library and living room. The room has a small table for meals or games and high, clear windows between wood cutouts that fill the room with light. Light fixtures are recessed.

Wright “made the 1,000- to 2,000-square-foot houses space-efficient by compressing bedrooms and corridors and eliminating the separate dining room in favor of large combined living and dining areas . . .,” wrote Reiss. The floors are concrete.

Since servants were not needed, the kitchen is small. Wright wanted the person working in the kitchen to be visible, available to the family. To maximize natural light, the cabinets open away from the window. Accordion doors save space and can be closed for entertaining.

There are two cozy bedrooms off a narrow hall and one bathroom. The natural, honey-colored red cypress, wood walls, inside and outside, eliminate the need for paint or plaster. Pope wrote in 1948, “There is no paint to be cleaned or to be done over every three or four years, at $500 or more per doing. There is no plaster – which means no mess, no future dust storms while that is being repaired or done over.”

To make the rooms feel bigger, Wright also designed much of the house’s furniture on a slightly smaller scale and integrated the furniture into the home’s design, to make it blend in. He designed the beds to be low and with no box springs. The unusually high doorknobs are his form of childproofing.

The furnace was in a small utility room, eliminating the need for a basement and a carport protected cars. Wright claimed he invented the term “carport.” The red concrete floor doubled as the home’s radiant heater “by virtue of the hot water pipes underneath,” Reiss wrote.

Wright felt that attics and garages encouraged materialism so the house has minimal storage space. He believed that “Americans had too much clutter,” said Amanda Roper, Woodlawn’s senior manager of Public Programs and Interpretation.

Wright sought to integrate the Usonian houses with their natural settings. Doors with windows lead to an outside patio, connecting the indoors with the outdoors.

The Pope-Leighey house was considered to be small by many then, but its design makes it feel larger than it is. It is “deceptively complex in design,” wrote Reiss.

After the Popes’ son Ned died in a tragic drowning accident, they had two more children, a boy and a girl. Needing more room for their family, they decided to sell the home and move to Loudoun County. On Nov. 7, 1946, the Popes placed an ad in the Evening Star. “FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT house of cypress, plate glass and brick: radiant heat; three bedrooms, two terraces; mostly furnished; one and one-third acres landscaped near house, rest in woods; small stream; $17,000.”

Marjorie and Robert Leighey purchased the house from the Popes in 1947.

In the early 1960s, the Virginia Department of Transportation was planning a highway known as Interstate 66 which would go straight through the house’s living room. Marjorie, a widowed teacher who was then living in the house, issued a public plea to preserve it, even meeting with then-U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and other officials on a Saturday in her home. In 1964, Leighey donated the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Trust moved the house that year to Woodlawn, near Mount Vernon. Woodlawn is the colonial estate of Lawrence Lewis, George Washington’s nephew.

The property was a treed lot similar to the Falls Church property for which it was designed. The house was reassembled by the same carpenter, Harold Rickert, who built the house. After returning from a five-year stay in Japan, Leighey returned and lived in the house until her death in 1983.

Preservationists had to dismantle and reassemble it a second time in 1996 because of unstable soils and cracks in the base so they moved it 30 feet uphill to more solid ground.

The Pope-Leighey House today looks much as it did when the Popes lived in it. “To most observers, it appears frozen in time, back to those first days in March 1941 when Charlotte, Loren and Ned first moved in,” wrote Reiss.

When Loren Pope passed away in 2008 at age 98, his memorial service was held at the Pope-Leighey House. An apartment building in Falls Church, Loren, takes its name from him.

“Every home should be as unique as the people living in it,” Wright maintained. This one is.

Click for more details: alexandrialivingmagazine.com  

Sullivan's Newark, OH "Jewel Box" Bank To Regain Its Lustre

A historic “jewel box” bank building by Louis Sullivan is being restored in Newark, Ohio. The refurbishment will be led by Rogers Krajnak Architects, an office based in Columbus, Ohio.

Sullivan completed the 3-story structure overlooking Newark’s Courthouse Square for the Home Building Association Company in 1915. Informally called “The Old Home” by locals, the building is just one of eight banks Sullivan designed in his career.

The Old Home’s exterior was restored in 2020. Now, Rogers Krajnak Architects is returning to focus on its interiors.

Today, the eight bank buildings Sullivan designed later in his career are known as his “jewel boxes.” These are by far Sullivan’s smallest projects when compared to his earlier skyscrapers, but arguably his finest in their attention to detail. The Old Home in Newark, Ohio, features elaborate hand-stenciled murals by Sullivan, who died less than a decade after it was built.

After the Home Building Association Company closed, the Old Home hosted a butcher shop, a jewelry store, and then served as an ice cream parlor. Each tenant made significant alterations to the building’s interior before it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

In 2013, the building was donated by Stephen Jones, a Newark native, to the Licking County Foundation. Restoration on the bank’s exterior started in 2020, seven years later.

The Licking County Foundation, a local nonprofit, has successfully raised $2.5 million to restore the building’s interior. The largest gift came from the Jeffris Family Foundation of Wisconsin which donated $1.2 million.

This funding will finance phase three of the project which entails restoring Sullivan’s bespoke murals. It will also help pay for a future annex attached to the Sullivan building connecting its three levels with an elevator and compliant stairs.

A grand-reopening ceremony will take place August 25, 2025. After, it will host Explore Licking County, the county of Licking’s travel and tourism bureau. It will have a visitors center and community gathering space with exhibition areas, retail, and public restrooms.

Click for more details: archpaper.com  

Wright Apprentice-Designed Home In Nashville For Sale

Without Frank Lloyd Wright and his immense influence on architectural design, modern residential architecture would look nothing like it does today. His use of open floor plans, natural light, organic materials, and simple one-story home designs was incredibly influential on the mid-century modern movement and laid the groundwork for so many aspects of modern home design that we now take for granted.

This gorgeous Nashville home, designed by Bruce Draper, is a beautiful homage to the iconic architect in every way. its designer, [Robert] Bruce Draper, was once an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1940s.

Robert Bruce Draper was an accomplished architect in his own right, and one of his homes, the Dr. Richard and Mrs. Margaret Martin House, is even listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

This lovingly crafted home wears its architectural influence on its sleeve. Between the omnipresent wood paneling, slate stone walls, and big, angular windows flooding the home with natural light, it maintains the simple, organic style that Lloyd Wright pioneered in his Prarie-style homes. It has this very warm, woodsy feeling that pairs perfectly with the lush arboreal landscaping outside, but its sleek, sloping lines and mid-century modern motifs create an air of style and prestige.

The home at 1117 Park Ridge Drive still has a lot of the original architectural details from its 1960 build that would be difficult, if not impossible, to recreate today. According to its Zillow listing, its beautiful exterior is made from real California redwood, has authentic solid terrazzo floors from Italy, and many of its ceilings feature shoji-paper inspired Oriental screen panels that help diffuse and soften the light. The home also features radiant floor heating - another Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired touch, as he favored heated floors over insulated walls for a cheaper, more streamlined construction that allowed for big windows and lots of natural light. This home sits only a 15-minute drive from downtown Nashville, Tennessee, but it's situated on a 2.43 acre plot of land hemmed by mature trees and simple, unpretentious landscaping, a miniature forest oasis with a stone's throw from Nashville's urban sprawl.

Click for more details: dengarden.com  

This SoCal Midcentury By A Frank Lloyd Wright Apprentice Just Hit The Market For The First Time

Designed by Frederick Liebhardt in 1961, the immaculately preserved Charles Dupont Residence in Del Mar, California, is a ’60s time capsule seeking $6.3M.

In 1947, Frederick Liebhardt joined the Taliesin Fellowship under Frank Lloyd Wright where he acquired the architectural orientation that he pursued throughout the rest of his career.

From the Agent: "On the market for the first time, this one-of-a-kind midcentury-modern home designed by San Diego master architect and Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Frederick Liebhardt rests on 3.18 sprawling acres of rolling grass hills with 100-year-old trees in the peaceful Montecillo neighborhood. The home is a master class in modernist design and has all of its original features, including walls of glass, geometric and angled rooflines, large woodburning fireplaces, high ceilings, clerestory windows, and sliding glass doors. Photographed in the ’60s by legendary architectural photographer Julius Shulman, this home is rich in history and has stood the test of time. This is an opportunity for the next owners to love, cherish, and be the stewards of a truly special property."

Click for more details: dwell.com  

Professor To Be Scholar In Residence At Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater

Designed in 1935, Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous modernist home Fallingwater is considered by many to be the world’s most iconic modern house. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Architecture Professor Kevin Nute has been appointed as a 2025 Scholar in Residence at the famous rural retreat in Western Pennsylvania.

Nute’s work at Fallingwater will focus on the timeless aspects of the house. The project stems from his recent book Embodied Time: Temporal Cues in Built Spaces (London: Routledge, 2024). The residency is funded by the Fallingwater Institute, an educational non-profit promoting harmony between people and the natural environment.

"I will be examining the ways in which the house is a suspension in time as well as space, primarily through its inclusion of archetypal human experiences and the perpetual presence of natural phenomena such as the falls,” said Nute.

The Fallingwater residency funds scholars’ travel and provides them with living accommodation on the site for the duration of their research. He plans to make multiple visits to Fallingwater during his 2025–26 sabbatical from UH Mānoa in order to study the house under the contrasting weather conditions of the four seasons in Western Pennsylvania.

His relationship with Wright’s work goes back to his doctoral work at Cambridge University, which won an American Institute of Architects International Book Award in 1994. An expanded and revised edition of that book will be published early next year as Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan Revisited: Traditional Japanese Culture as a Source of Modern American Architecture (London: World Scientific, 2025).

Click for more details: hawaii.edu