Archinect - News

Frank Lloyd Wright's early Prairie-style design lists for $779,000 in Illinois

2024-03-29T14:41:00-04:00

The home credited as one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Prairie School designs, the 1900 Warren Hickox House, has hit the market recently in Kankakee, Illinois, for a listing price of $779,000.

Realtor.com was early to report news of the home’s listing, which represents the first time the home has been available for purchase in 48 years. Sited adjacent to the R. Harley Bradley House from the same year, the 3,277-square-foot design features four bedrooms and 2.5 baths and is completed by a Japanese-inspired roofline the then 33-year-old Wright was drawn to even before his first visit to the country in 1905.

First floor plan. Image: Freiluft/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust describes: “Despite the relatively small scale of the residence, Wright created a sense of both interior and exterior expansiveness through his use of a modified cruciform plan and his manipulation of architectural space, form, and details.”

Second floor plan. Image: Freiluft/Wikimedia Co...

Marcel Breuer's Wellfleet Cottage is at the center of a preservation battle on Cape Cod

2023-08-24T12:12:00-04:00

Campaigners seeking to save Marcel Breuer’s 1949 Wellfleet Cottage residence on Cape Cod have launched a $1.4 million fundraising effort aimed at saving the home from an expected demolition that’s likely to come in the next few years.

The Cape Cod Modern House Trust is spearheading the effort and says the home they have agreed to purchase from Breuer’s son is in danger adding to the tally of historic designs in the area they have been unable to save through preservation since 2016.

The house was at one time a haven and meeting place for Bauhaus alumni and intellectuals associated with Breuer and his wife Connie. The architect himself designed a large art studio addition in 1961 before adding another apartment and darkroom for his photographer son Tamas in 1968. The Trust says its sale will include all of the home's original furnishings (including pieces from the Eames' and Eero Saarinen), art collection, and private library, which will all be made available to public view after the ...

Frank Lloyd Wright’s stately Westhope home lists for $8 million in Oklahoma

2023-04-21T12:56:00-04:00

Frank Lloyd Wright's historic 1929 Westhope home has just hit the market in Oklahoma.

Sage Sotheby’s has the property listed for $8 million in Tulsa, with local real estate investor Stuart Price as the seller.

According to the listing, the 5-bed, 4.5-bath home is 10,405 square feet, making it one of the largest residential projects designed by the architect. It joins two other in Carmel, California and the Phoenix area as Wright designs to have come on the market since the new year. The home is one of only three Wright commissions in Oklahoma between 1929 and the Price Tower in 1956 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 following a 1965 renovation.

Image: Sarah Strunk Photography/Sage Sotheby’s International Realty

Local publishing magnate Richard Lloyd Jones envisioned the home as a “symbol of Tulsa’s future.” The structure features the same “textile blocks” system seen earlier in the Enni...

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...

Edith Farnsworth House: Name change emphasizes Farnsworth’s role in creating an American masterpiece

2021-10-19T12:38:00-04:00

As part of the house’s 70th-anniversary celebration next month, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has announced that the iconic Farnsworth House will be renamed the Edith Farnsworth House in order to better recognize the cultural and architectural contributions of its namesake, Dr. Edith Farnsworth.

The name change coincides with the trust’s “Where Women Made History” campaign, which now recognizes Farnsworth for her rightful place as a doyenne of American high culture.

Edith Farnsworth (left) and Beth Dunlap, 1951. Image © William Dunlap

According to a press release: “Ahead of her time in the post-World War II era, Edith Farnsworth lived an independent life of cultural and intellectual exploration and discovery. For decades, her story, as well as her pivotal role in the creation of this landmark, has not received the prominence it deserves.”

Image © Edith Farnsworth Papers, The Newberry Library

Ever the bon vivant, Farnsworth’s eye for artistic talent lead her to Mies van ...

An early Paul R. Williams house is on the market as conservationists push for monument status

2021-09-06T10:00:00-04:00

A home belonging to one of Los Angeles’ most storied architects is now one step closer to being saved following a unanimous vote by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission.

The Jefferson Park home was Paul Revere Williams’ principal residence for nearly 30 years and has been listed on the market for $1.6 million. The Los Angeles Conservancy submitted an application to the Commission wherein it cited the historic value of the home, which Williams inhabited during his rise to prominence in the city’s busy interwar period. The site “illustrates a part of Paul Revere Williams' life and story that is rarely told or fully understood,” according to a Los Angeles NBC affiliate.

Many of Williams’ houses have been mistakenly demolished owing to the fact that many of his business records, which were kept in a bank vault in nearby South Central Los Angeles, were destroyed when the branch was burned to the ground as part of 1992’s LA Riots.

Related on Archinect: 2017 AIA Gold Medal posthu...

Hidden well discovered in home built in 1800s; man falls through floor

2020-07-08T12:14:00-04:00

According to The New York Times' Allyson Waller, "Chris Town was assembling a bed frame for a friend's son in a 19th century house in Guilford, Connecticut....when the floor gave out beneath him." Town had fallen into a fieldstone cistern well that was concealed beneath the floor boards, Waller reports. The well was 20 feet deep and was filled with about seven feet of water.

Firefighters were called to come and rescue Town from the well, a feat Capt. Chris Gode said he has never had to execute in his 26 years of service. According to Waller, the house was built in 1843 and the floorboards over the well was likely a later addition.

"Sometimes homes had wells in their basements in order to protect them from freezing,” Dennis Johnson, director of health for the town of Guilford told The New York Times. "Then, with really historic homes, sometimes we occasionally find them in an addition on a house, or in a basement or right next to the house. Occasionally you do find them, but it’s not...

Home of Auburn’s first architecture dean has been restored and repurposed for student use

2019-09-24T10:00:00-04:00

A historic home designed by the first dean of the Auburn University School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture (SAPLA) has been restored for use by students and professors.

The home, a Dutch Colonial Revival-style residence listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was recently purchased by Auburn engineering alumn Walt Woltosz and his wife Ginger. The Woltoszes purchased the home, according to the SAPLA website, as a gameday house, but decided to donate the structure to the university when they discovered that it had in fact been designed by SAPLA’s first dean, Frederick Child Biggin.

Biggin designed the house in 1927 when SAPLA was known as the School of Architecture and Applied Arts and Auburn University was the Alabama Polytechnic Institute. According to a historic district landmark designation report, Biggin was a graduate of Lehigh and Cornell universities, and came to the college in 1916. He would go on to head the school for 27 years, “institutin...

Happy Birthday John Lautner! To celebrate, here are 10 projects photographed by Julius Shulman

2019-07-16T19:45:00-04:00

John Lautner's influential architectural legacy is hard to miss. Some of his works, like the Elrod House in Palm Springs or the Chemosphere in the Hollywood Hills, have been depicted in blockbuster Hollywood movies. Other projects, however, live on as humble—and not so humble—structures, fulfilling the uses they were originally designed for. Either way, Lautner’s legacy remains a fixture of American architecture.

Over time, Lautner's projects, each one, a pinnacle of spatial design, material, and detail, have become synonymous with Los Angeles, Googie Architecture, and Mid-Century Modernism, overall. Today, in celebration of his 108th posthumous birthday, Archinect has collected beautiful photographs by Julius Shulman of some of John Lautner’s works from across the decades, thanks to the Getty Research Institute’s Digital Catalog—Take a look!

Desert Hot Springs Motel (Desert Hot Springs, CA) 1947. Image courtesy of © J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

Desert ...

Safe from demolition, Richard Neutra's Chuey House seeks "preservation-minded buyer"

2019-01-04T17:36:00-05:00

The Los Angeles Conservancy, which spearheaded the landmarking efforts, canceled plans to name the property a Historic-Cultural Monument after agreeing to a deal with owners Paul and Gigi Shepherd to “take demolition off the table.” That means buyers must be willing to relocate the home if they plan to build on the stunning hillside vista where it sits.

Now listed for $6.25 million, Richard Neutra's historic Chuey House in Hollywood Hills is still up for grabs. “According to listing material, the one and a half acres upon which [the house] sits could accommodate a 20,000 square foot megamansion. That’s more than 10 times the size of the existing structure,” the article states.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan Revival-style Ennis House on sale for $23 million

2018-06-27T15:31:00-04:00

Located in Los Feliz, the 5,500-square-foot house was built from 27,000 concrete blocks, with some blocks featuring intricate geometric patterns. [...] Ron Burkle purchased the home from the nonprofit Ennis House Foundation for $4.5 million in 2011, property records show. After purchasing, he then restored it, adding an extra $10 million to improve the home after it had suffered major damage from a previous earthquake and heavy rains.

The Geffrye Museum has created an interactive tour of iconic London home design

2017-11-29T16:07:00-05:00

Hackney's Museum of the Home, Geffrye, has teamed up with Go Compare to offer an interactive tour through over 400 years of English urban homes. The museum, which will close in January 2018 for a two-year refurbishment, is set in an 18th century Grade I listed almshouse and explores home and home life from the 1600s to present. Inside, the museum features detailed displays of London, middle-class living rooms and gardens that are made available for the first time through their virtual tour to 'visitors' outside of London.

A living room in 1965. Photo by Chris Ridley.

The interactive allows one to explore the radically changing interior design tastes of Londoners from before The Great Fire of London up until the turn of the millennium. Some of the rooms on display include a a typical eighteenth century parlour from a Covent Garden townhouse, an Edwardian suburban drawing room, and a modernist townhouse living room among others. Going from room to room, one can see firsthand how Lond...

A lush, photographic tour of the Icelandic Turf House

2017-07-27T14:08:00-04:00

The Turf House Tradition of Iceland was nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status in 2011. “The turf house is an exceptional example of a vernacular architectural tradition, which has survived in Iceland,” according to the nomination. “The form and design of the turf house is an expression of the cultural values of the society and has adapted to the social and technological changes that took place through the centuries.”

Although living walls are still considered to be somewhat noteworthy in contemporary design, Iceland's architecture has been overgrown with the technique for hundreds of years. Along with a history of turf as a building material (and the pressures of modernism on Iceland's architecture in the 20th century) this National Geographic article showcases the haunting beauty of the Icelandic turf house, where the climate is pretty much rainy and picturesquely contemplative for the entire year.

Image: Thomas Ormstom via Flickr

Lloyd Wright's Sowden House gets a cameo in The xx's new music video

2017-07-05T15:29:00-04:00

Lloyd Wright's concrete-block John Sowden House in Los Angeles makes a special appearance in “I Dare You”, the latest music video from British indie-pop band The xx as their “love letter to Los Angeles”.

Directed by fashion photographer Alasdair McLellan in collaboration with Raf Simons, the saccharine music video playfully alludes to the infamous Black Dahlia murder that took place at the house in the 1940s. In the video, a group of mischievous, lovey-dovey teenagers — featuring “Moonlight” actor Ashton Sanders, actress Millie Bobby Brown from “Stranger Things”, and Michael Jackson's daughter Paris, among others — dare each other to enter the haunted Wrightian home.

What ensues when the teenagers step foot into the house? Watch the full video below to find out.

h/t Phaidon

Eisenman's iconic 'House II' is now on the market for $850K

2017-04-18T17:36:00-04:00

Built in 1970, ‘House II’ by Peter Eisenman is a major icon of structuralist architecture—and it’s now on the market for $850K.

One of ten experimental houses Eisenman designed, only four of which were built, House II is heavily influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky. The house comprises three two-story bays sheathed in plywood and intercut with skylights, partial walls, and openings in the floor. But the design wasn’t exactly contextually-appropriate: its flat roof didn’t mesh with the cold Vermont winters. So the original designers added a slightly sloped roof, floor grates, and expanded walls.

Even then, House II suffered from leaks and moisture-trapping paint. Eventually, in 2000, the rather deteriorated house was renovated and brought back to its original design “less as a practical dwelling than as a landmark of late-twentieth-century architecture”, according to the Society of Architectural Historians.

Now it can be yours! Situated on a beautiful 80-acre plot of land, it comes ...

The Booth House, Philip Johnson's first constructed commission, now up for sale

2017-04-17T17:35:00-04:00

Built in 1946 in Bedford, New York, the 1450 sq. ft. Booth House was Philip Johnson’s first constructed commission. In 1955, photographer Robert Damora and his wife, the architect Sirkka Damora, moved in, intending for it to serve as temporary housing until they could build a home of their own design. After falling in love with the spare design, they stayed—until now. At age 93, Sirkka Damora is unable to manage the home physically or support it financially. The Booth House has been put up for sale and Damora is on the hunt for a new owner respectful of the value of the design.

The Booth House is similar to the Glass House in many ways. It’s built on a wide, grass-covered podium and features a large central fireplace as well as lots of glass. Unlike the Glass House, the Booth house has private rooms as well as generous storage. The Damora family were respectful of the original design even as their family grew. So they expanded by adding a subterranean lower level. They also built a s...

A new beginning for Rosa Parks' Detroit home

2016-10-05T18:11:00-04:00

[Rosa Parks' home] on South Deacon Street had become blighted and faced demolition in recent years, but its fortunes have since changed. The home’s facade has been removed and will be refashioned into a replica-style artwork that will be shown in museums across Europe...“She loved the city, but I don't think the city loved her very much back,” [Parks' niece Rhea] McCauley said. “This house should have been preserved here. But we live in a world where every other project takes precedence.”

You would think that the Detroit home of Rosa Parks would have more easily garnered local support for its preservation in the present day. But as Parks' niece Rhea McCauley described, her aunt was still treated with hostility when she moved into the city in 1957, two years after she refused to give up her bus seat. That attitude seems to have carried on as McCauley struggled to find a backer to preserve the home, saying that “Doors have been slammed in [her] face”.

Luckily, McCauley was able to get help from artist Ryan Mendoza, who will transform the house's facade into a replica-style art piece that will tour museums across Europe. Why Europe? Mendoza, who acknowledged that he isn't even from Detroit, says it's “a statement about the lack of interest in preserving the home in the city where it actually existed”.

h/t Quartz

New Jersey’s Oldest and Largest Frank Lloyd Wright House Listed for $2.2M

2016-07-07T12:36:00-04:00

Of the four houses Frank Lloyd Wright built in New Jersey, the first and largest was the 2,000-square-foot James B. Christie House, which dates to 1940. Wright built the home on seven acres of secluded woodland and employed his Usonian principles of simplicity and practically that connect to nature. After selling in 2014 to a private buyer for $1.7 million, the Christie House is now on the market for $2.2 million after receiving a new roof and heating system.

The price of keeping Britain's 'Downton Abbeys' from crumbling

2016-04-14T15:06:00-04:00

“Downton Abbey is just down the road from us," Mockler-Barret said. “And we’re so jealous of Lord and Lady Carnarvon. Although they won’t tell us how much they’ve made from 'Downton Abbey,' I think they’ve done quite well out of it.” But that’s the fairytale. The residents of Milton Manor will be happy if they can just patch up their inheritance and avoid the humiliation and disgrace of losing the ancestral seat after 250 years of family ownership.

Beyoncé filmed her NOLA-themed "Formation" video at this historic Pasadena mansion

2016-02-10T20:16:00-05:00

Despite the themes of the video, nothing was shot in New Orleans...The concept and quick turnaround required Tobman and the rest of the crew to convert [the Fenyes Mansion in Pasadena into a] fitting Southern Gothic set...A Beaux Arts mansion commissioned by and built for Dr. Adalbert Fenyes and his wife Eva Scott Muse Fenyes in 1905, there was nothing really Southern about architect Robert D. Farquhar's design

If you're still bumpin' the Queen Bey's latest hard-hitting single, get a glimpse of the history behind the Fenyes Mansion in Pasadena, where parts of the song's impressive music video were filmed.

More music-related goodness on Archinect:

Another Frank Lloyd Wright house is discovered in Madison

2015-10-26T17:44:00-04:00

[Frank Lloyd] Wright experts announced that the Madison house [that local resident Linda] McQuillen bought for $100,000 has been verified as an American System-Built House, part of Wright's effort to develop and market well-designed homes at a more affordable level — his first effort to reach a broader audience. It's the second such house identified in the past four months, one out of only 16 ever built and 14 still standing...It took years to unearth the evidence about McQuillen's home.

You can read about the first American System-Built House here.

More about FLW homes on Archinect:

How Frank Lloyd Wright's Bachman Wilson House was moved from New Jersey to Arkansas

Frank Lloyd Wright's "Unity Temple" getting a $23M restoration

Frank Lloyd Wright house causes controversy in wealthy Phoenix neighborhood

Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House to reopen once again in February

Meet the preservationist trying to revolutionize historic house museums

2015-10-21T18:12:00-04:00

"One of the problems with house museums is you keep kind of circling back to the same people who come….Eventually they are going to die and there's going to be no one coming to your parties," [says Franklin] Vagnone [the executive director of New York City's Historic House Trust]. He wants nothing less than to revive interest in the house museum. Museums don't need to think about "changing the color of their garment…what they need to do is completely change their outfit..."