From the Archive: When Frank Lloyd Wright Designs Your Home, You Never Want to Leave

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s November 2006 issue.

In West Lafayette, Indiana, John Christian is preparing to give 83 kindergartners a tour of his house, in which triangles appear in one unusual detail after another. In Canton, Ohio, Jeanne Spielman Rubin is sewing new slipcovers for the banquette in her hexagonal living room. Christian and Rubin, both 89, have never met, but there’s a good chance they would hit it off. Both seem far younger than their years, both pride themselves on their resourcefulness, and both—not coincidentally—live in homes designed for them by Frank Lloyd Wright.

According to Lisa Dewey-Mattia of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago, there may be as many as two dozen original Wright clients still living in the houses they commissioned, most of them in the 1950s. Many of the owners are idealists whose houses give them a sense of purpose after most of their contemporaries have moved to retirement homes—or beyond.

The 1950s is remembered as a decade of standardization—the era in which industrial techniques and social conformity gave rise to millions of identical houses. Everyone, the official history of the period goes, wanted a square house on a square lot.

Yet in the 1950s Wright completed more than 90 houses, most of them for young couples who were determined to express their individuality. They weren’t wealthy, some had to scrape together every last nickel to raise their cantilevered roofs. Christian says it took Wright five years to deliver the plans for his house, and that was fine, because he and his wife didn’t have the money to build it. When they did break ground, they had to forgo some aspects of Wright’s design—including a copper fascia (which the couple, keeping their promise to Wright, finally erected in the 1990s).

One thing the clients had in common was that they wanted houses that fit how they lived—not how society thought they should live. In Tallahassee, Florida, Clifton Lewis wanted small bedrooms and a large communal space where her family could gather to discuss the important issues of the day. Christian, a professor of nuclear biology at Purdue University, requested a living room where he could entertain up to 50 students at a time. Wright gave him a kind of amphitheater, with stairs on both sides of the room, plus long banquettes and interlocking stools. In Pleasantville, New York, Roland and Ronny Reisley were attracted to the notion of living cooperatively at Usonia, a Wright-designed community where land was held in common and decisions were made jointly.

The owners, for the most part, aren’t rich now, despite inhabiting important works of art. Rubin says she has to choose between keeping her house in pristine condition and providing music lessons for her six great-grandchildren. And Lewis is still hoping to get the money together to build the terraces that Wright designed as an important element of her semicircular dwelling.

So what if Lewis is already close to 90? Wright was in his 8os when he designed the house. (He died at 91, in 1959, at the end of an astonishingly productive decade.)

Longevity seems to go with the territory, perhaps because carrying on Wright’s dreams—and their own—gives the owners a raison d’être.

"It’s been a miracle for us," says Bill Tracy, who, with his wife, Elizabeth, owns a Wright house near Seattle. The Tracys (she’s 93; he’s 83) say they still maintain the house themselves. Which is no surprise: In the 1950s, they spent a year pouring 10,000-plus bricks before construction could begin. "We were young and strong, and it would have cost us too much to have them made," Bill explains. Rubin, who does her own upholstering, says she believes in self-reliance. "I must have read Swiss Family Robinson at an impressionable age," she declares, referring to the story of resourceful castaways.

All of Wright’s clients brought idealism and energy to the task of figuring out where they would live. "As young marrieds, we talked about what we wanted out of life, and part of it was a home that reflected who we were," states Christian. Rubin recalls being told by a local architect that the right style for her house in Ohio was French provincial—and knowing there had to be something better. Then she saw an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about a Wright house in Oberlin, Ohio, and contacted the owners, who invited her to visit. The owners of the house in Oberlin "were gracious to me," says Rubin, "and I try to follow that tradition." She proved it a few weeks ago by giving a stranger, who arrived unannounced, a tour. It concluded with a discussion of Froebel blocks, the toys that Wright said influenced him as a child; Rubin has written the leading book on Froebel—and chided the visitor for not starting his children on the mind-expanding toys at birth. Like many Wright clients, she has become a Wright disciple.

Roland Reisley, a physicist, and his wife, Ronny, a psychologist, were New Yorkers looking for a place to start a family when they heard about the cooperative community being designed by Wright. After Wright laid out the town (with its unique round lots), other architects designed most of the houses. But the Reisleys went directly to the master. Roland and Ronny (who died this past spring) raised three children in the house, without changing a thing—their goal was to ensure that future generations could see the building just as Wright envisioned it. They’d also like people to see Wright as they envision him. "There’s a prevailing notion that Wright was a genius, but difficult to work with," Roland says. "We didn’t find that at all, and neither did the other Wright owners we’ve talked to."

Christian talks about his luck in getting Wright to design his house: He happened to call the architect’s studio, he says, when Wright himself was answering the phone. Over the next five years, Christian and his wife met with the architect at both Taliesins, in Wisconsin and Arizona. At one meeting Wright told them the house would be named Samara, and if they didn’t know what it meant, they should look it up.

As it turns out, a samara is a winged seed pod. Wright used the abstracted form of the samara all over the house. When school groups come through, Christian shows them an actual samara, and then asks them to identify the places where Wright employed its shape, however subtly. Last year, Christian escorted some 2,500 people through the house. Says the retired professor, "I’m more of a teacher now than ever."

Preparing for the future, Christian has enlisted 30 volunteers to help him maintain the house, wrangle the school groups, and raise money for future operations. In the early 1990s, he formed a nonprofit foundation, which will eventually take over the ownership of Samara. "I wanted to start the foundation while I was still young, so I could make sure that it worked," he explains wryly.

Rubin has kept her house in good condition, but she could use the 30 volunteers. The house’s unusual details, including wooden soffits cut into geometric shapes, mean that repairs tend to be costly. "I’m hanging on by my teeth, and my teeth aren’t that good," she jokes. "But I couldn’t imagine living anyplace else." Two other Wright houses (whose owners hired Wright after seeing the Rubins’) still stand in the neighborhood, but their original owners are gone.

The Wright owner who faces the biggest hurdles may be Clifton Lewis, a freethinker who was born into one of Tallahassee’s most prominent families. In the 1940s, she met Wright at a world federalism conference—they were both believers in international government—and she persuaded him to design a house for her young family. Not long after, Lewis became one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in Tallahassee. Her activism led some white customers to abandon her husband’s bank, plunging the once-wealthy family into genteel poverty. The Wright house, still not finished at the time, suffered along with them.

"My mother and father had a certain amount of money and ran out of money at the point when the interior was completed," says Ben, one of the Lewises’ four children.

These days, the masonry on the outside of the house is crumbling, and the roof is propped up with two-by-fours. Then, too, the lack of storage space has led to an almost comical solution: Lewis has strung up clothes lines across the double-height living room. The mess was reported in a story in a Florida newspaper, which Ben says was "heartbreaking" because his mother had sold a beloved beach house, her only other remaining asset, to raise the money for a roof repair.

"She’d like help with the house, but only with no strings attached," explains Ben. Lewis hopes that when the house is finished, she can move to a new building across the street, and turn the house into a place where people, inspired by great architecture, will talk about making the world a better place.

If that sounds far-fetched, so was the idea of hiring the great Wright in the first place. As her daughter Byrd Lewis Mashburn declares, "The house is what she lives for."   

Related Reading:

From the Archive: When It Comes to Renovating an Eichler, How Much Change Is Too Much?

3 Years and Over $2 Million: What It Costs to Restore a Frank Lloyd Wright Home