An appraisal FINDING FRANK An underappreciated treasure trove, one sleepy Chicago suburb is home to the largest collection of houses by America’s premier architect, as CLAIRE WRATHALL reports The architect Frank Lloyd Wright Built in 1902, the Arthur B Heurtley House is today a protected National Historic Landmark The living room at Wright’s Home and Studio, where he pioneered the use of built-in furniture E rnest Hemingway wasn’t fond of Oak Park. “A place of wide lawns and narrow minds” he called the sylvan suburb of his birth, 16 kilometres west of downtown Chicago. Yet his parents’ near neighbours numbered two dozen clients of the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the pioneers of American Modernism, who moved here a decade before Hemingway was born, building his own Home and Studio at 951 Chicago Avenue. Wright may be best known for buildings such as the sublime Fallingwater, a private house in Pennsylvania, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, but the greatest concentration of his domestic projects is to be found hereabouts. This includes buildings such as the Arthur B Heurtley House at 318 North Forest Avenue, the first expression of Wright’s signature Prairie Style: low, long linear structures, all horizontal planes and shallow roofs with wide overhanging eaves. Or the earlier Walter H Gale House, at 1031 Chicago Avenue, commissioned by the proprietor of a local hardware store, with its double-height mansard and shingled witch’s FROM TOP: TOM HOLLYMAN/GETTY IMAGES, ALAN WEINTRAUB/ARCAID/LAIF, RABOUAN/HEMIS.FR/LAIF 26 departures-international.com
The graceful lines of the children’s playroom at Wright’s Chicago Avenue Home and Studio, shone by light sources high and low FROM TOP: RABOUAN/HEMIS.FR/LAIF, ALAN WEINTRAUB/ARCAID/LAIF, JON MILLER/HEDRICH BLESSING/ARCAID/LAIF, MARVIN KONER/CORBIS “give me the luxuries of life, and i will willingly do without the necessities” f rank l loyd w right hat-topped turret. Gale also commissioned what’s become known as the Robert P Parker House (at 1019 Chicago Avenue), whose steep, irregular roofline and polygonal dormers are perched above crimson walls. Wright also remodelled houses, such as the home he created for the banker Peter A Beachy at 238 Forest Avenue. Wright reoriented the once Gothic cottage so that it faced south, knocked down its interior walls to create an open-plan space and imposed most of the key elements of Prairie Style on its exterior: the concrete podium on which it appears to rest, the overhanging eaves, the strong sense of geometry and the Japanese screen-like windows. It’s also worth pausing to admire the Frank W Thomas House, another early example of Prairie Style, at 210 Forest Avenue, and the pleasingly symmetrical George W Furbeck House at 223 North Euclid Avenue, one of 15 Wright houses on the market at the time of writing; at 9,000 it includes the custom-made dining table, chairs, sectional sofa and rug. (So obsessed was Wright with controlling the look of his buildings, he would Wright transformed what was once a Gothic cottage into the Peter A Beachy House in 1906 Set square in hand, Wright surveys architectural drawings Drafting room at Wright’s Home and Studio CONTACT PLATINUM CARD SERVICE FOR BOOKINGS departures-international.com 27
