Pratt house is for sale

Richard A Levin · Post by **Richard A Levin** » Mon Jan 14, 2019 9:39 am

The Pratt house is for sale for $499k. It is an off market sale so its not listed anywhere. This is one of four Wright homes in the Acres community in Galesburg Michigan. Serious potential buyers should contact Fred Taber at [email protected]

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Mon Jan 14, 2019 9:45 pm

Fred has posted here as fishigan, hero of Galesburg and rescuer, largely, of Eppstein and apt conveyor of its saga . . .

S

peterm · Post by **peterm** » Mon Jan 14, 2019 9:54 pm

http://www.michiganmodern.org/buildings ... ratt-house

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Mon Jan 14, 2019 10:34 pm

Thanks, Peter; nice group of photos. Bringing the end elevations off the page and into space is a special treat.

The only disappointment might be the masonry perforations, with their static symmetrical figure and nearly inexplicable mis-matched terminations . . . ?

S

peterm · Post by **peterm** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 12:17 am

And the unresolved, awkward corner wood fascia terminating and not wrapping around the corner, as seen in the last photo.

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 12:59 am

Yeah; what's up with that ?

Staley and Muirhead are two other Usonians, from 1950, that have three- or four-board "thick roof" fascia.

I'm going to look for Pratt elevations . . .

S

Roderick Grant · Post by **Roderick Grant** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 11:54 am

Pratt, according to Storrer, had a trellis where the wood fascia abruptly terminates, which may be the as-built version, with the trellis removed. Mono and Taschen show various versions, suggesting that Eric Pratt may have been a meddlesome client, requesting major changes along the way. The end product is not FLW at his best. Yet the interior is very pleasant. (Don't judge by the living room photo in Mono!)

Roderick Grant · Post by **Roderick Grant** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 11:59 am

One thing I dislike about both Pratt and Meyer is the white of the exterior.

outside in · Post by **outside in** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 12:05 pm

We tried stripping the white paint from Meyer, but we ran into a masonry-based paint that Wright recommended after Meyer expressed displeasure with the quality of the block and masons. The paint would require sandblasting to remove. The Owner chose a new color that was more of a warm light gray that looks much better!

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 1:30 pm

Plan Ã‚Â© W A Storrer

Original plan and views:

....................................................................................

Ã‚Â© 19868 A.D.A EDITA Tokyo Co., Ltd. and by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

Birtcher residence, H H Harris, 1942

peterm · Post by **peterm** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 5:00 pm

I recently saw Pratt, and didnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t even notice that the block was painted. The color was nearly identical to new block without the patina of water stains, dirt and moss. It didnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t look white.

The whole enclave of the Acres at Galesburg is idyllic.

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 9:17 pm

The house looks great in these photos. It's clear that something changed at the carport/shop end of the house, after Futagawa's photo
(above) was taken.

Matt2 · Post by **Matt2** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 10:03 pm

I always liked Pratt in its original compact form...a lot of architecture in a small package. The devil is in the details, such as how the masonry reads as either square or layers in some photos depending on how flush the vertical seams are made.

SDR · Post by **SDR** » Tue Jan 15, 2019 10:25 pm

This is a custom block, 12x16, that at first glance could be ordinary CMU, coarsened in texture by virtue of being larger than expected, with fewer courses to a given wall height. And the
proportions of the modified block are exactly the reverse of what one might expect from this designer, who typically favored low and extended, as in the FSC elongated block, for instance.

This block has a minimal bevel to its edges, assuring a certain shadow line no matter how the mortar is raked or tooled. There is a 16x16 corner block; is it L-shaped ? Is the wall 8" thick ?

The 16x16 block of the 'twenties was perhaps the beginning of this post-Prairie enlargement of the masonry texture . . . and like Textile Block this late development is, by definition, stack
bond masonry -- tres chic and right up-to-date in the 'fifties.

S

Roderick Grant · Post by **Roderick Grant** » Wed Jan 16, 2019 10:54 am

SDR, the Futagawa photo shows the original construction, as shown in Storrer, with the trellis at the back end of the carport/studio where now there is the oddly terminated trim. However, the trellis was only 12" deep, whereas the trim is ~25" deep, so there must have been something funky going on before the trellis was removed.

The 12"x16" blocks have 20" diagonals (3-4-5), which was the scale used for the Winn House perf blocks. Apparently the block size for all the Kalamazoo houses was made the same to save on manufacturing. There are no 16"x16" blocks. There are some 12" high blocks cut to lengths of 8" and 12" to accommodate the fenestration. And, yes, the walls are 8" thick.

Possibly the house isn't as white as it appears in the photos, but it doesn't look like raw concrete, either. When I visited in the 80s, it was painted tan.