Wright Rediscovered

By Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer

Wright Rediscovered
The plan of the house takes the form of a large parallelogram, with the courtyard entrance passing under the roof, which connects the servant’s room on one side to the laundry on the other.
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Wright Rediscovered
The living room is topped by a teepee-shaped roof covered with cedar shingles. Its large glass window walls meet at a 120-degree angle, and doors open onto a terrace bounded by low stone walls.
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Wright Rediscovered
From there a covered path edges an open courtyard to the front door, angled between the living room and a hallway for the bedroom wing.
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Wright Rediscovered
The hallway leading to the bedroom wing branches to the left as you enter the house. Wright used rough-sawn pine, stained the color of cedar for the interiors. The owners recently had interior designer Pamela Duncan refurbish the house, replacing upholstery, bedspreads, and curtains in accordance with the original fabrics and colors.
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Wright Rediscovered
The original owners and their heirs have kept the interior of the lodge intact, including Wright’s specially designed furniture, such as the desk in a corner of the living room.
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Wright Rediscovered
Because the morning temperatures can be chilly, even in summer, Wright put fireplaces surrounded by stone walls in each bedroom.
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Wright Rediscovered
A child’s room in the caretaker’s cottage lacks a fireplace but still seems cozy due to the extensive wood paneling. Designed by Wright in 1952, this cottage was not realized until 1972, when the son of the original owner had it built for his own family.
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Wright Rediscovered
The outstanding feature of the lodge is the living room, where the ceiling rises to a 28-foot height. At the perimeter, the roof drops to an 11-foot height, underscored by a flared rim that runs around the exterior of the entire lodge. A continuous band of narrow clerestory windows marks the point where the high roof joins the lower one and dematerializes this juncture with light. Inside, the rough-sawn rafters of the lower roof extend through the open space under the high ceiling, creating a spectacular kaleidoscope of geometric forms overhead. This innovative system of construction for the living-room ceiling remains unique in Wright’s residential work — he never used it again.
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Wright Rediscovered
Photo © Trevor Tondro

Exclusive: a tour inside a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Southwest reveals the power of the original interiors, never before published.

I visited the Fir Tree House only once, in 1950. An apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright, I was on my way from Taliesin in Wisconsin to Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, with another apprentice, John deKoven Hill, who had supervised the stonework for the house. Wright had finished it in 1948 for a family who wanted a vacation home with four bedrooms, three baths, and a separate servant's room and bath in a remote valley in the Southwest. Also required was a service wing for the laundry, a water-pumping facility, and a stable—all for an original budget of $10,000, which was eventually exceeded.

While the owners were very private, they welcomed us on that chilly October morning before they returned to their home in the Northeast. We were driving a sporty but elegant Lincoln Continental cabriolet'redesigned by Wright'and when we arrived we found a fire burning in the great living room's fireplace. The soaring space was phenomenal, the furniture specially designed by Wright was outstanding, and with the smell of smoke we felt we were in a great baronial hall looking out onto a wild, untainted landscape. The house sits on a gentle sloping meadow running down to a river, with a mountain, studded with fir trees, rising on the other side.

The mountains, the river, and abundant firs must have brought to Wright's mind his project conceived in 1923, the never-realized Lake Tahoe Summer Colony in Emerald Bay, California. Whereas the teepee roof of the hillside cabin for the earlier project rose over a square plan, in the Fir Tree House he elongated the roof for the living room. The owner also wanted the living room and master bedroom to face north to take in the splendid view of the mountain.

Wright's design called for combining stone walls with rough-sawn pine boards and cedar shakes. He had developed a construction technique for the walls at Taliesin West, which was built in 1938: although the Arizona desert was strewn with stones, they could not be dressed or cut in the manner of most normal stonework. So Wright placed the flat surfaces of the rocks in a wood form, poured the concrete around them, then removed the form to reveal a mosaic surface of stones in different sizes and colors. In the Fir Tree House, however, the stonework posed a problem, since the contractor was unfamiliar with this type of masonry. So Wright sent for John deKoven Hill, who worked on the project from the start. The result was very successful. With its grandly rustic architectural elegance, the Fir Tree House stands alone in Wright's oeuvre.