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Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Fawcett Farm lists for $4.25M in California's Central Valley

2022-12-14T18:37:00-05:00

One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s final Usonian designs is now on the market in central California. Real estate firm Crosby Doe Associates recently listed Wright’s Fawcett Farm in Los Banos for a cool $4.25 million and is beginning to take offers on the 7-bed, 6-bathroom home that was completed just two years after his death in 1959.

Image: Jim Simmons

The house was built by local football legend Buck Fawcett and his wife using plans Wright drew up for them before his passing. It includes a koi pond, small museum, Japanese garden, workshop, and recessed pool. The lot it sits on is sized at 76 acres and offers the opportunity for commercial crop development on what Fawcett described to Wright at the time as “the most fertile agricultural land in the world.”

Image: Jim Simmons

Featuring an L-shaped interior with open plan, classic mid-century wooden built-ins, and furnishing arrangement designed by Cornelia Brierly. Other enhancements include a high-end sec...

Frank Lloyd Wright-designed doghouse is back on display at the Marin County Civic Center

2022-06-15T17:10:00-04:00

In 1958, Frank Lloyd Wright broke a personal record with a cottage he designed for Seth Peterson, a longtime admirer of his work. At just 880 square feet, the home along Mirror Lake, in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, is the smallest residential building Wright ever touched. But it isn’t his smallest structure. Instead, that honour goes to a doghouse, which Wright conceived in the mid 1950s and is now on display at the Marin Civic Center, in San Rafael, California.

In the early 1950s, Robert and Gloria Berger commissioned Wright to design a Usonian-style home for their family in San Anselmo, California. In 1956, their 12-year-old son, Jim Berger, wrote to Wright asking for plans for a matching doghouse for his Labrador retriever, Eddie. The architect provided the plans for a four-square-foot structure, written on the back of an envelope, the following year. The miniature home, dubbed Eddie’s House, was triangular in shape and featured signature Wright details, such as a low-pitched roof with an exaggerated overhang. Wright suggested Berger use scrap pieces of Philippine mahogany and cedar left over from the home’s original construction.

The doghouse wasn’t built until 1963, following Berger’s return from an army tour. When Jim’s father died in 1970, the original structure was scrapped. However, in 2010, Jim and his brother Eric rebuilt the shelter using the original plans and donated it to the County of Marin, in Northern California, in 2016....

A rare Frank Lloyd Wright Texas home sells for $2.7 million

2021-11-12T12:14:00-05:00

The sole example of Frank Lloyd Wright-famed Usonian style in the greater Houston area has been sold for $2.7 million to a pair of unnamed buyers.

The Houston Chronicle is reporting that Wright’s coveted William Thaxton House was able to lure a new owner at a reduced price. The home had been on the market for most of this year after being initially listed for $3.15 million.

The now 8,000-square-foot home is one of only three houses in the state that Wright designed and has undergone several renovations and was given a heavily-publicized addition in 1991. Originally constructed in 1955 for a local insurance executive, Wright’s concrete block design features two fireplaces, an inground pool, and accessible courtyard with a plethora of steel-framed windows that give the home his signature inside-out harmony with the natural world.

Floor plan courtesy of William Storrer, adapted by Douglas M. Steiner. Source

Featuring a unique parallelogram footprint, the new owners will enter through t...

Frank Lloyd Wright's early Usonian Charles and Dorothy Manson House is for sale

2020-06-26T18:23:00-04:00

The Charles and Dorothy Manson house is an early example of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses. Designed in 1938 and completed in 1941, the distinctive horizontal roof line descends four levels down the cascading wooded lot on Wausau's prestigious and historic East Hill neighborhood.

Looking to pick up a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian house in central Wisconsin? The early 1940s 4-bedroom, 3-bath Charles L. and Dorothy Manson House in Wausau just entered the market.

"Departing from his early Usonian houses with right-angle corners," explains the listing, "Frank Lloyd Wright experimented on using a square unit system but incorporating 30 and 60 degree angles for the Charles L. and Dorothy Manson House. As a result the house varied from a typical I or L plan house and paved the way for Wright to further investigate triangles and parallelograms in his future design."

The asking price for the residence is $425,000.

Consider this though: Does owning a Frank Lloyd Wright home come with a secret curse?

Cranbrook receives Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Smith House as donation

2018-04-23T13:25:00-04:00

Cranbrook, known worldwide as an architectural set piece, is getting a new gem in its diadem — a Frank Lloyd Wright house. The house was built in 1950 by Sara and Melvyn Maxwell Smith. The donation came from the Towbes Foundation. “The Smith family always said they didn’t want this to just pass to another set of homeowners,” said Gregory Wittkopp, director of the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. “The phrase they used was they wanted it to be ‘an educational resource.’ ”

The donation by the Towbes Foundation was a gift "that other design schools would kill for," The Detroit News reports and tells the legendary tale of A. Alfred Taubman donating a substantial portion of the windows to the cash-strapped Smith family to get the FLW-designed house finished before the winter of 1949.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s upstate mushroom-shaped house asks $1.5M

2017-11-06T14:46:00-05:00

In Pleasantville, New York is a 1947 Usonian community of 50 houses that blend in with their surrounding landscape. All were approved by Frank Lloyd Wright, but three were built by the architect himself, the Sol Friedman House being one. Famous for its mushroom-shaped roofs and carport, the incredible home is now for sale asking $1.5 million.

courtesy of Houlihan Lawrence

Frank Lloyd Wright's Sturges House is for sale, for the first time in nearly 50 years

2015-12-29T12:37:00-05:00

Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA) has announced that Frank Lloyd Wright’s George Sturges House will be among 75 lots from the estate of the actor and playwright Jack Larson to be auctioned on February 21. [...] When a house like this became available in 1967, Larson and Bridges were looking for something that exemplified their interests in all things artistic, it was very exciting for them to acquire. It was a trophy. It will be a trophy, probably, for the next owner.

The 1,200 square foot home, located in Brentwood Heights in Brentwood, Los Angeles, was designed and built in 1939, with a budget of $9,000 (adjusted for inflation, that would be roughly $153,671 today). It was the first Usonian house to be built.

The bidding is estimated to begin at $2.5 to $3 million.

Frank Lloyd Wright's La Miniatura finally sells in Pasadena

2015-05-29T18:37:00-04:00

Recognized by Wright as the earliest 'Usonian' house, La Miniatura is also the first residence to utilize Wright's highly inventive textile block building system.

After hitting the market in 2013, La Miniatura (aka The Millard House, 1923) was originally listed at approximately $4.5MM. The final sold price hasn't been made public, but the house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is located in Pasadena's Prospect Historic District – neighbors include Greene & Greene's Bentz House (1906), and Arthur and Alfred Heineman's Hindry House (1909).

Wright had said of the house, "I would rather have built this little house than St. Peter's in Rome."

Florida Southern's College's Stray Cats Getting Own Frank Lloyd Wright Styled Dorms

2013-02-13T00:05:00-05:00

Treasured for its storied collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, esplanades and soaring fountain, Florida Southern College is making room for six more structures inspired by the famed architect. These new structures will be small — only about 5 feet high and 3 feet wide. Unlike other Wright designs, they are not meant for humans. Rather, the six domiciles built mostly of custom-made concrete blocks will provide shelter for almost 100 feral cats living on the Lakeland campus.

A Long-Awaited Tribute: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian House and Pavilion

2012-07-16T13:31:00-04:00

On October 22, 1953, Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright opened in New York on the site where the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum would eventually be built. Two Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings were constructed specifically to house the exhibition: a temporary pavilion made of glass, fiberboard, and pipe columns; and a 1,700-square-foot, fully furnished, two-bedroom, model Usonian house representing Wright’s organic solution for modest, middle-class dwellings.