There were two very young men in the group; both had short dark hair, deliberately tumbled looking. They were both tall and thin; they both wore long skinny jeans; and they quietly compared notes with each other throughout the tour. They looked, I thought, about 16, and my head whipped around in shock when the just slightly shorter of the two murmured, “When I bought my house…”
There was a younger couple—younger, that is, than I am—maybe 40’s, maybe 50’s. He was round and lurked in corners; she was short and wiry. She darted off to see what the guide pointed out, then darted back to whisper to him. When we all left the rooms, they would linger and explore.
There was James, of course.
And then: the rest of us, all of a certain age…one solitary man in his baseball cap and rock and roll t-shirt who sat a lot; he kept glancing around for affirmation when wonders were exposed. (Some experiences, after all, are meant to be shared. We smiled and nodded at him. Yes! we were saying. Yes! We see that too!)
The other eight or so of us were couples, comfortably aging and interested, slouching along in our grandparent jeans and soft-soled shoes. I had a moment of knowing that all eight of us were long-hairs in the seventies; knowing that back then, we would have been aggressively inhabiting the spaces, dragging tattered bellbottom hems over the hardwood floors, flicking back shining locks, breathing out, “Coooooooolllllllll…”
That moment passed, but it was the kind of veil-lifting, I’ve found, that happens when we visit places steeped in history. And we were at the Westcott House in Springfield, Ohio, a Frank Lloyd Wright home, on the road trip Mark decided he wanted to take for his 65th birthday.
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I read Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, and so I knew, at least from a fictional but heavily researched point of view, about Wright’s scandalous relationship with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, which took place, the New York Times review of the book reminds me, right about when Wright was designing his groundbreaking Oak Park house for his wife and children. It was the early 1900’s; Wright was in his thirties, establishing himself as an architect after parting ways with his mentor, Louis Sullivan.
Under Sullivan, Wright absorbed the concept of the Prairie School of Architecture. “These were single-story homes,” Biography.com tells me, “with low, pitched roofs and long rows of casement windows, employing only locally available materials and wood that was always unstained and unpainted, emphasizing its natural beauty.”
The Westcott House, designed in 1906 and built in 1908, fits snugly into that description. Although the house underwent many metamorphoses during its ample life—the most damaging to its design, perhaps, being chopped up into apartments during World War II,—the house is almost entirely restored to its glory.
We watch a short video about Wright and the Westcotts and the house’s rise, its settling into obscurity, and its triumphant return at the hands of hundreds of dedicated volunteers. Then our tour guide, Suzanne, who is also about our age, confident and knowledgeable, takes us through the ‘front’ door—which was actually, in a Lloyd-ian logical way, hidden on the side of the house,–and into the library.
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Wright was young and not tremendously well-known when the house was completed; his scandalous leave-taking of his family had not quite yet occurred. And he hadn’t gained the iconic status he would later earn; ask someone NOW for the name of an American architect, and chances are, Wright’s name is the one that will roll, immediately, off their tongue…
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Jim recently confided that he would love to live in a room lined with shelves that were filled with books. He looks around the library, with its vintage books stocked in glass-fronted shelves, and he whispers, “Cooolll…”
The furniture we saw artisans making on the video is here, completed; the tables and chairs are built to look like Gustav Stickley’s Arts and Crafts designs. The room is filled with the warmth of wood and washed in golden autumn light; windows ell on the outside walls, letting the sunshine surround us.
There is a picture of Mrs. Westcott (Orpha Lefler Westcott) in her turn-of-the century finery, standing proudly in this very room. She was posed in front of the windows; she had softened them with dark-colored curtains.
The curtains, Suzanne informs us, would not have met with Wright’s approval. He wanted to remove the boundaries between the outdoors and the inside…although he did understand the need for room darkening shades which should be placed so that they all but disappear when not in use. But he was maybe young enough, and maybe uncertain of his status enough, at this point in time, that he didn’t argue design with the matron of the home.
And there is no evidence, Suzanne tells us, that Wright actually ever visited the Springfield house.
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The year after the Westcott House was built, Wright made his scandalous split from his family, and he and Mamah went to Germany. The architect, his biography tells me, put together a portfolio there that cemented his international acclaim. Ironically, his architecture, steeped in being truly United States-ian, was not as famous at home.
Wright and Mamah returned to the States in 1913, and he designed and began building them a home—Taliesin in Wisconsin, on land that his mother’s family owned. The name meant “shining brow,” and the home was intended to be a refuge and a haven, a place where Wright and Mamah could be happily together. And it might have been that for a tiny slice of time, but in 1914, one of Wright’s servants killed Mamah and her two sons, locked workmen in the dining room, and set the home on fire. As the workers tried to escape, the servant hacked at them with a hatchet. They all died.
Wright was devastated, according to his biography, but he immediately began to rebuild; he wanted, Biography.com says, to ‘wipe the scar from the hill.’
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We move from the library to the inglenook, centered on the fireplace, with built-in banquettes,–a place where the family could gather, and where friends could bask in the warmth. We sit on the banquettes, softened by long cushions, and we listen to Suzanne tell us about the Westcott family and the quest to reclaim their treasured home.
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In the dining room we exclaim over the low rise of the chairs, and we wonder how comfortable that might be, sitting down to a meal.
Not very, says Suzanne drily, but she asks us to please not try them out. We move off from the common rooms, leaving the slightly younger couple stealthily sliding into the pantry.
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A year or two ago, close friends and I toured Graycliff, a Frank Lloyd Wright home built on the shores of Lake Erie in western New York. It was designed and built for Isabelle Martin, the wife of a Buffalo, New York, industrialist (Wright had designed and built a Buffalo home for the Martins between 1903 and 1905; Graycliff would serve Isabelle as a summer home.) Graycliff emerged on its cliff between 1926 and 1931. Wright WAS on site and involved for the construction of that home; when Isabelle made demands that thwarted his design plans, there were tussles. Many of the light-filled, expansive features of the Westcott house grace Graycliff, too.
By 1936, Wright had been married, again, and divorced, again, and re-married. He had built the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo for the Japanese emperor. The Hotel was the only building to withstand a catastrophic earthquake that rocked Tokyo the year after the hotel was built. (Wright had insisted the hotel was earthquake-proof.)
His acclaim grew exponentially. Taliesin had been destroyed, again by fire…this time sparked by faulty electrical wiring, and Wright had, again, rebuilt it. And he designed hundreds of other buildings, too. But, when the Great Depression dried up architectural commissions, he started the Taliesin Fellowship, a place where aspiring architects could learn from him, and he seemed to disappear. He would have been, at about this time, in his 60’s; retirement, a move to teaching,would have been logical and understood.
But then he came roaring back, building Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. “Shockingly original and astonishingly beautiful,” Biography.com confides, “Fallingwater is marked by a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces constructed atop a waterfall in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. It remains one of Wright’s most celebrated works, a national landmark widely considered one of the most beautiful homes ever built.”
Wright didn’t slow down; he went on to design and build many more structures. The most famous was the Guggenheim Museum, which opened its doors in 1959…six months after the death of its architect, who was 91.
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Both Orpha and Burton Westcott had their own bedroom and private bath; their suites were adjoined by a connecting door.
Look at the closets, suggests Suzanne, and we do, our furtive friend waiting until we are on our way to the kids’ rooms to do his own exploring. In 1906, Orpha and Burton Westcott both had walk-in closets; they each had a luxurious bathroom of their own. Their son and daughter each had their own room and shared a Jack and Jill bath.
What luxury! I am reminded of watching Leave it to Beaver in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s and being amazed, not so much at Beaver’s antics, but that Beaver and Wally had their own bathroom.
What would THAT be like, child me wondered, watching the show, not to have to share a bath?
Wright was answering my question years before I was born.
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We wend through the servant’s quarters: solid, sturdy rooms without the luxurious finishing touches of the family spaces. Floors are wood, not tiled; the tubs are ample but not capacious. We troop through, downstairs to the kitchen, an unusually large room with plenty of cupboards and countertop space. Wright seemed to have an intuitive feel for what each person in the home would need: thinking space, sharing space, working space.
We wander outside, into the broad, sheltered greenness of the courtyard, where the plantings are kept as close to Wright’s vision as possible. The tour winds down, and we end where we started, in the gift shop. Suzanne answers last questions. We browse but do not buy; we visit, just off the shop area, the pony stalls where the Westcott children sheltered their shaggy little beasts. And then it is time for us to go. Our tour mates, except for one couple still talking with Suzanne, have disappeared, too.
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We end the day, after a fruitless search for a local eatery, someplace homegrown and funky, with sandwiches in a reputable chain restaurant. We talk about the features of the Westcott house.
“That library…” says Jim.
Mark likes the way functional stuff—heaters, for instance,–was hidden behind simply designed but beautifully symmetric screens and vents.
“A bathroom all to myself…” I murmur longingly, and, “Hey!” they both protest. “We’re not that bad to share with.
Are we???”
I let my answer slide, and I think of Frank Lloyd Wright, a force for certain, a bounder, perhaps, but a man who embraced his genius early on and then determined he’d let nothing stop him from developing it. He persevered, through a personal history fraught with peril and alarm, and he changed the way the United States lives and how we envision luxury. He took the cluttered poshness of Victorian days and he threw open the heavy, dusty drapes, cleared off the cramped tabletops, and let healthy light shine in.
We’d like, we agree, to visit Oak Park, and to check out the Frank Lloyd Wright house Suzanne told us about that’s a B and B in Chagrin Falls. The boyos have not seen Graycliff yet; we should go back there. We should all visit the Darwin Martin House.
And we should go back to East Aurora, where we once visited a wonderful old fashioned five and dime store and ate the best beef on ‘weck we’d had in years. We should go back and tour the Roycroft Campus, where furniture was once made in that arts and craft style Wright favored so highly.
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Our visit to the Westcott house was an intersection: a time shared with strangers who became, for a moment, companions; a time of realization and reckoning for Mark as he steps into a new era; a lifting of the veil of time and feeling, so closely, the life of a man from another age.
It is important, as Simon and Garfunkel sang, to stop awhile and think on this, to maybe let the boundaries between what’s outside our brains and what’s inside them soften and melt for at least a little while, to practice, perhaps, an organic kind of Prairie School of Introspection.
Let the outside in. Let the light illuminate our dark corners. Touch the past and embrace the future.
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So Long Frank Lloyd Wright (third stanza)
Architects may come and
Architects may go and
Never change your point of view
When I run dry
I stop awhile and think of you
—Simon and Garfunkel
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https://www.biography.com/artist/frank-lloyd-wright