Frank Lloyd Wright Rug Designs

goffmachine · Post by **goffmachine** » Fri Jul 27, 2012 9:29 am

Has anyone started a thread about The Rug Designs by Mr. Wright?
http://www.savewright.org/wright_chat/v ... 9d11affac3
What got me started thinking was that it is difficult to find any image of the rug designed for Max Hoffman and its eventual creation for Mrs wright at Taliesin Spring green. According to a note I read in FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT DRAWINGS-1990 PFEIFFER
Also how many and which homes had rugs specifically designed for them? David Wright etc. And which homes never had them made or which homes do not have them any longer.

jmcnally · Post by **jmcnally** » Fri Jul 27, 2012 9:42 am

Here is a drawing for the rugs at the Meyer May House (S.148):

The finished product can be seen in many of the interior photos shown at http://www.flwright.us/FLW148a.htm

Reidy · Post by **Reidy** » Fri Jul 27, 2012 10:07 am

Bogk and the Imperial had custom rugs. Wright designed one for the Hollyhock living room that was apparently not executed until after 2000.

Some of the Usonians have wall-to-walls that he specified, if that counts. I believe Mossberg is one. Mildred Rosenbaum said that their cherokee red tint was improperly applied (the weather was too cold), and people were tracking it all over the house, so he approved wall-to-walls as a way of dealing with this.

Roderick Grant · Post by **Roderick Grant** » Fri Jul 27, 2012 1:26 pm

There is a 12" square drawing of Hoffman in the ADA Edita Portfolio #148 published in the 80s (the red-orange one), showing it in the plan of the Hoffman living room as it was to be fitted, as well as a portion of the long hallway runner. It is also in the "2000 Deluxe Engagement Book" (May). The original colors differ significantly from those used for the Olga rug; there is no pure white, more of a soft buff background. The colors are less bold. One can almost hear Sousa's "Stars And Stripes Forever" blaring from the Taliesin version.

This is an instance of a design so specific for its site that transferring it to the Taliesin living room and gallery makes it look ludicrously inappropriate. Olga told of how she nagged FLW to design a rug for Taliesin, but he didn't get around to it. If he had wanted a rug for the living room, he would have stopped production on anything that got in the way to do it; if he had thought Hoffman would work, he would have had it made. He did neither.

At one time, the rug was placed in the Assembly Room at Hillside, where it looked much better.

The current owners of Hoffman had a designer do a sort of 'riff' on the original design which is much more restrained, but works very well. A '90s Architectural Digest article on the house includes a photo of this rug.

I drew the plan for the Hollyhock rug, and worked with Ginny Kazor on the color scheme, about which there was scant information. A small rug for the the entry with a 'tail' running up the dining room steps was also designed, but that has not been made.

jmcnally · Post by **jmcnally** » Fri Jul 27, 2012 3:54 pm

When Wright provided for rugs or carpeting, did he ever have a stock design he could use, or did he always design from scratch?

Were the rugs and carpets manufactured by regular commercial manufacturers, or were they made within Taliesin's community of artisans?

Reidy · Post by **Reidy** » Fri Jul 27, 2012 8:45 pm

Never heard of a stock design. He might have made more of them if the advantages of (semi-)mass production had been available.

Most of the rugs (all but Hoffman / Taliesin, I believe) predate the Fellowship. I doubt that they had the specialized skills if they only did one. The Imperial rugs were done in China. The plan at Hollyhock was to work with W & J Sloane, which in turn was going to sublet them to a workshop in Austria.

Some Arizona Biltmore rugs have come up for auction:

http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/a ... re-hotel-1

http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/r ... wright-rug

I don't know if Wright had anything to do with them. You'd need something in writing (like a signed drawing or a letter) to prove that he did.

Jerry K. · Post by **Jerry K.** » Sat Jul 28, 2012 2:45 pm

Many of the rug designs for the Prairie homes that people associate to Wright were created by George Mann Niedecken. Those designs are pretty well separated out from Wright in many books.

No one on this website will make that mistake, but I've had a few interior designers talk to me about "Wright's bedroom rug design for the Coonley house" - which was actually a Niedecken design.

Reidy · Post by **Reidy** » Sat Jul 28, 2012 3:10 pm

The historians' rule, as I understand it, is that if the architect of record ordered and approved some decorative design (or entire building for that matter) and assigned the work to somebody else, it still counts as the architect's product. If Niedecken did the rugs or furniture for Wright, they're Wright's; if he did them later on direct commission from the owners, they're Niedecken's.

Scholars have made entire careers of this kind of question. It's Tintoretto's painting, to be sure, but did Titian really paint the robes?

Roderick Grant · Post by **Roderick Grant** » Sun Jul 29, 2012 2:48 pm

It's Tintoretto's painting, but the robes came from K-Mart's White Sale.

CEP · Post by **CEP** » Sun Jul 29, 2012 4:11 pm

I too worked with Roderick and Ginny on the Hollyhock living room carpet. As Rod mentioned, documentation was indeed slim (no photo of the original carpet in situ has surfaced to date, no yard or color samples have survived that we know about) - all we really had were a series of telegrams and letters between W. & J. Sloane and Schindler, copies of the original and revised design drawings and one color transparency from the Taliesin archives which was not entirely definitive as to the final color scheme.

I looked for a Sloane archival repository for a long time but came up empty-handed, I'm afraid (the same fate in trying to track down Barker Bros archives as well - they were responsible for many of the original HH furniture pieces). Had we been able to find that archive with specific information from that era, we might at the very least been able to verify exactly what the field color of the carpet had been - Sloane had assigned a number to the shade - #2911. The other shades (purple, blue and gold) were a back-and-forth process of sending yard samples and at one point a carpet remnant with a flower pattern that included all of the general shades wanted for the living room carpet. Final color approval came on April 11, 1921. I did find a small book published in 1950 about the history of the W. & J. Sloane company. Not meaning to contradict Reidy on Austria being the possible manufacturing site of the original carpet, because I've heard the same thing mentioned before as well, but the Sloane company did have a long standing manufacturing agreement with a firm in India (Khan Bahadur Shaikh Gulam Hussan & Company) for handling all custom designs for the company dating back to 1882 through 1948. But because there was no mention with regard to the manufacturing site in any of the Wright correspondence, and without any corroborating evidence through Sloane's or 3rd party correspondence, I guess it'll just remain a mystery.

CEP · Post by **CEP** » Sun Jul 29, 2012 7:17 pm

sorry - I really do know how to spell 'yarn'...

Wrightgeek · Post by **Wrightgeek** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 10:29 pm

Unless I am mistaken, didn't FLW design custom rugs for the Robie Residence? And maybe for Huertley as well, although that is just a guess.

Beth Shalom Temple? And the Price, Jr. Residence? A few more guesses from my increasingly muddled memory banks.

And I am pretty sure that he also designed a custom rug for the Christian Residence as well, which was only executed and installed within the past 6-8 years or so.

Paul Ringstrom · Post by **Paul Ringstrom** » Tue Jul 31, 2012 1:12 pm

You are correct on the Christian House rug.

Did Wright or Niedecken design the Robie rug?

RayinPenn · Post by **RayinPenn** » Mon Sep 14, 2015 5:18 am

In the drawing the website name is very clear but the rug design is not clear to me!

pharding · Post by **pharding** » Mon Sep 14, 2015 8:30 am

The Niedecken rugs for the 1909 Meyer May House are exquisite. Steelcase had 3 living rugs made using original yarn samples, period photographs, and the original design drawings by GMN.

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