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Frank Lloyd Wright's Tirranna home sells for $6 million in Connecticut

2024-01-30T14:58:00-05:00

A treasured Frank Lloyd Wright home once resided in by the architect himself has sold for a reported $6 million in suburban New Canaan, Connecticut. The house is one of Wright’s largest designs and was purchased for $2 million below the original $8 million asking price that was published with its first listing in June 2023.

Tirranna House was originally built for the local Rayward family in 1955 and features seven bedrooms with eight full bathrooms in a horseshoe plan covering some 7,861 square feet on 14 acres of land. It has had just four owners in the subsequent 70 years, according to Robb Report. Wright lived in the home during the construction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York after 1956 and incorporated some of the same clerestory windows used in the museum’s design into the home’s greenhouse, which is joined by a guest residence, five-car garage, converted wine cellar, and barn.

Image courtesy Houlihan Lawrence

Featuring a lively palette of Philippine mahogany ...

Two-for-one special: Pair of Usonian Frank Lloyd Wright homes hits the market in Michigan

2023-09-29T18:37:00-04:00

A pair of Usonian-period Frank Lloyd Wright homes have hit the market in Galesburg, Michigan, for an asking price of $4.5 million, according to a combined listing posted last week by Christie’s International Real Estate.

Located in The Acres, a Wright-designed subdivision that remained unfinished after the architect began work on the more successful Parkwyn Village nearby, both the Samuel & Dorothy Eppstein House and Eric & Pat Pratt House offer approximately 2,000 square feet of premium living space inside of Wright’s signature concrete block and mahogany detailed exteriors.

Image courtesy Victoria Krause Schutte/@properties Christie’s International Real Estate

Christie’s says the original built-ins of the houses have been well preserved by their owners, along with Wright’s floorplans. The sale represents the first time Wright homes have been offered in a bundle, and follows a spate of other rare homes in Arizona, Northern California, Texas, and Oklahoma to have been listed in the ...

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?

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.