The Barrett-Tuxford House

The Barrett-Tuxford House, in Richland Center, Wisconsin (birthplace of Frank Lloyd Wright) was designed by Arthur Dyson, an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright. After studying at Taliesin, Dyson moved to Oklahoma to work under Bruce Goff. He embraced both the tenets of Organic architecture and Goff's daring experiments and vision. He felt that organic architecture should express the spiritual and not be an end in itself as just a decorative technique.
Arthur Dyson was very familiar with southwestern Wisconsin. Not only had he been an apprentice at Taliesin, but he acted as dean of students at the Wright's school from 1999 to 2002.
Bruce Barrett and Edith Tuxford, retirees who commissioned the home in 1985, met as docents at Frank Lloyd Wright’s A.D. German Warehouse in Richland Center. They shared a love of Frank Lloyd Wright, architectural trends and cutting edge design. They named their street The Wright Way and hoped that one day the home could act as a study center about Frank Lloyd Wright's legacy.
Dyson overcame the challenges of a steep, heavily wooded site on the edge of town by choosing a pod shape that was to become a hallmark of his design vocabulary over the next few decades. Not only could the curved, reinforced concrete back wall hold against the hill's pressures (the back of the house is underground), but it allowed the front of the house to be a kind of inverted hemicycle oriented on a perfect east-west axis to allow the maximum amount of light in the home year-round.
The earth excavated from the foundation was pushed out by bulldozers to fill a massive, triangular reinforced concrete wall that is faced with local limestone.
The home’s roof is also curved and is a single sheet of rubber membrane painted silver. A laminated solar ‘baffle’ of 20-foot-long 2”x2” redwood strips bent by hand runs the length of the home, allowing the sun to stream into the passive solar home in winter, but blocking the sun entirely in the summer.
The home has a small footprint, with only 1250 square feet. It has one bedroom and two bathrooms.
Edith and Bruce, already in their late 70s when they built their home, loved to entertain and wanted a home that allowed easy flow from the terrace to the house. Edith loved bird-watching, and one of the benefits of the large terrace is that it looks out into tree-tops.
The home also features two massive beams that stretch from the back of the house and extend past the walls of the terrace. They bring the inside out and the outside in, while also giving home to solar shades in the summer, allowing for shaded meals outside.
Dyson reinterpreted Wright's famous hanging light fixtures them for this home. The 12 foot tall sculptural fixture hanging in front of the fireplace with its thick, backlit glass plates is a work of art.
The current owners, Will Green and Cliff Schiesl, have worked with Dyson over the years to update the house and add features that were missing when the house was built in 1987.