Wright Chat

I love this little house, and it looks great. Two comments: What's the third photo? It looks like a view of the living room through an icy window. And I assume the table in the nook was not veneered with a plastic, but the photo makes it look thus. This is a house that should be private. What a terr...

Galesburg is a bit far out of town. Possibly its location had something to do with it. Pratt is also somewhat bland. It's a nice house, but Meyer and McCartney are much stronger architecturally.

Really, Paul, you think Cooke is a better design? In my opinion, Laurent is by far the better design, a masterpiece. Cooke is a very good house, but not in Laurent's league.

re: "Maher's only building in the west, the Blinn House ..."

The tile overmantle at that house was, like Husser, DD Martin and Ennis, designed by Blanche Ostertag. The pattern is closer to Ennis than Martin or Husser, but they're all very much alike.

SDR, rest assured the middle bedroom has direct access to the hallway. There are many small, but sometimes significant, errors in Storrer's book.

Schindler's How House is on the market, so it would be possible to arrange a viewing. It's also quite visible from the street, 2422 Silver Ridge Ave. His Bubeshko Apartment building at SE corner of Griffith Park Blvd and Lyric Ave. has been restored. Lloyd Wright's Home & Studio is just a few bl...

This is a steal at 280. The neighborhood is excellent. The 1-acre lot is beautifully landscaped and very private. The block work is as good as any Usonian Automatic. When I saw the house in '95, Mrs. McCartney was still in residence, and said the copper heating system worked as well as when it was i...

Wrightgeek, I think the property has changed hands more than once since the owner who hired Eric to work on it. I suspect some bank owns it. It may be considered one of those toxic assets.

Oboler was another client FLW didn't like. He was cheap, and altered important elements of design just to save money. For instance, the redwood boards called for were of a certain width, but Oboler got lumber of a narrower width for considerably less, and used it without consulting FLW. That, as you...

That's the first time I've ever seen that mural. One thing is clear, if it's in the Laurent House, its provenance is not questionable. My guess, and that's all it is, is that the mural was done by Gene Maselinck, although it is more literal than Gene's work tended to be. Other houses with such detai...

One image that looks to me more accurate than the Tudoresque quality of early photos of Willits is the demolished Oscar Steffans House (1909, S153) which seems to show a much less strident contrast between wood and plaster.

McBroom did not use a mirror image of the plan. I believe it was altered more than that. The stepped fenestration follows the same configuration as the original plan, which means that the fireplace was not only turned 90 degrees, but moved to the opposite side of the room, presumably with the kitche...

This is a nifty design, about as minimalist as Peterson. It was virtually repeated for the Berta Hamilton Project, 1947, Brookline, VT (Mono 7, pg 157) with a second bedroom added. The principal element that FLW seemed to stress is the fenestration of the main facade, which has stepped windows in th...

Eleanor's retreat was built according to the above plan. It burned down to the masonry base and was rebuilt at some point in the past. There is an unbuilt design, the drawing of which I have seen published in only one source, "FLW, Three Quarters of a Century of Drawings" (Horizon Press, 1...

The questions about the Prairie houses should also go beyond the light-colored plaster. The b/w photos also make the wood trim look darker than it probably was originally, so research should also be done to verify exactly what color that was. I suspect there was less contrast than the early photos s...