House Beautiful
August 1948

The Love Affair of a Man and his House
By Loren Pope

(This story of what a modern house means to its owners came to House Beautiful unsolicited. We held it for more than a year before we decided to be brave enough to publish it. We say “brave” because it will make a lot of our readers very angry. But since it is true that a house is so much more than mere shelter, we think people ought to know about it.)

For six years we lived in a truly modern house, designed and built for us by Frank Lloyd Wright, the world’s greatest architect and one of its greatest men.

And because there are many people to whom honest, organic architecture is an uncertain venture, we want to tell what it has meant to us. But first, let us say that we are neither arty nor dilettantes. Reading Mr. Wright’s autobiography was what opened the door to a new world in living.

What we have found was this: It is the only kind of house fit for man to live in. It is not expensive. It is the best kind of home investment. It is far and away the most practical. It is the only kind that has anything to offer the spirit. And finally, the lending public is way behind the buying public in its stunted judgment of what kind of house is desirable and valuable.

All this the house itself has proved to us. We would not be such fervent admirers of Mr. Wright today if his performance and his preaching had been two different things. You get to know a house very well in six years.

Like any other human effort, it had its faults. All of them but one were remedied, and that could have been remedied.

Now, here is something of what our house is like, and some of the evidence that bears on the controversial subject of modern architecture.

Ours is a big small house for a small family. It is L-shaped, one-story on two levels because the lot slopes, with a living room of eleven-and-a-half feet high, and a red-colored concrete floor, which also is a radiant heater by virtue of hot water pipe underneath. (Of this, more later.)

For light, ventilation, and decoration this house has a patterned ribbon of clearstory windows between the top of the wall and ceiling. You can sit by the fireplace at night and see the stars. It has rows of plate glass doors from floor to ceiling where an ordinary house has a single window. Where these doors meet at a corner post – the room just opens into he outdoors. And from these doors, the floor flows right on out on two sides of the living area to become terraces. And just the thickness of one brick down is the grass, and beyond it the trees and the woods that are as much a part of the decoration as the draperies or colorfully cushioned furniture. The furniture was designed and built for the house.

It has brick supporting piers that not only work, but are part of the interior finish. It has cypress wood walls only two-and-a-half inches thick. In the center are vertical boards. On both outside and inside are identical, horizontal, twelve-inch cypress boards and interlocking battens – no studs or other members – all screwed together.

There is no paint or plaster, and no masking of any material. The finish, both outside and in, is clear wax, a treatment that reveals and softly complements the beauties of brick and wood.

The house is all straight lines and right angels – on the blueprints. In the flesh it is like a gently molded girl who carries herself erectly. The natural charm of the materials in the hands of the master architect is the flesh on the bones of the blueprint. If you have seen color pictures of Wright’s interiors or other good modern interiors, you have noticed that the gaiety and warmth of wood and brick have a charm and pull that paint can never capture. Other architects realize it – as witness the number of houses that copy Wright’s.

The house has smooth horizontal flow. The few vertical accents, such as the brick piers, emphasize the horizontal flow that ties the house to the earth and that gives it great repose.

Where the roof levels change, they are continued inside as decks, or as an open trellis to accentuate this flow. This handling of changing levels or planes, and of proportions is so masterful that the interior space seems to come alive. After having experienced it, no one could ever go back to the painted box, which is all the ordinary house really is, however elaborate. This handling of space relations, and the delicate openness of the house, give the same sense of relief and shelter as walking in a forest, where the leafy limbs cut sunlight and space into a continuing succession of mysteries. The house gives you a sense of protection, but never of being closed in and leading you on beyond where your eyes can see.

It not only is easy to decorate, but lends itself magnificently to it. Some boughs of pine and oak, or some sprays of flowing shrubs and a few blossoms, and Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Even on the darkest ordinary day, the house never looks cold or drab. The undulating lines of tawny cypress, the warmth of red brick, and the gay-colored textiles prevent that.

There is something else. The honest use of materials satisfies the urge you feel when you think you’d like to have a log cabin or a rustic hide-out in the mountains. What it does is fill the need for gentle purging of the soul provided by something simple, natural, and beautiful.

Altogether, it is a soft warm symphony of charm. And it has the beauty that springs only from the quality of naturalness. Being natural, the marks and the grayness of age add a new glow and a serenity that a painted lady lacks. It is a thing of beauty. And it meets the test of beauty. Its loveliness increases.

So does its effect. It is quite fitting to use these lines, since we feel them so deeply: “It leadeth me beside the still waters; it restoreth my soul.”

It is the only kind of habitation fit for man because it has a presence and a soul. Why? First, because it is a work of principle. And the other reasons grow out of the first. Because it is a work of principle, it is honest, and being honest, it is both eloquent and quiet. Buildings are close to our lives and influence them, continuously or subconsciously. Mr. Wright’s buildings are a tangible expression of his philosophy. He thinks of America as synonymous with freedom. And to him, freedom has many ingredients; among them truth, courage, frankness, and space to live in, uncramped. All these things are part of the house and proclaim themselves, eloquently but quietly.

Thus, the material that does the work also furnishes the decoration with its own charm. The house is free and open and gives a sense of space and release a free man responds to. The outdoors is so adroitly made a part of the living scheme that the dweller breathes as deeply as in a meadow in spring. And he obtains the same kind of unburdening of the little worries of life. That may sound fantastic to one who has never experienced it, but it is true. It is like living with a great and quiet soul. Some of its peace and calm carry over to you. That is one reason I say it is the only kind of house fit for man to live in. It is a lift for his soul as well as shelter for his body. It is an implicit sermon on truth, beauty, and simplicity. It does not intrude, but is always there for comfort.

As for the evidence, we might as well begin at the beginning, because it offers some.

We don’t think anyone ever built a house with more warnings in their ears than we did. We heard tales about how much more Wright’s buildings cost than he figured; how little he cared about his clients’ means or their wishes; and how we would find ourselves with a white elephant on our hands. One of the tale-tellers was an official of the Federal Housing Administration. Among other things, he said that Wright’s apprentices (who supervise construction) we crackerjacks, but didn’t know the value of a dollar. He was half right.

THERE were other fantastic falsities. But we were aware that a man isn’t shot unless he towers too high above the herd. We also were aware that none of the architects we were aquatinted with had ever claimed to have built a house within five hundred dollars of his estimate of the cost.

But because we had faith in the principles and in their enunciator and practitioner, we set no cost limit on Mr. Wright. We told him what kind of house we wanted, and that our income was on the shady side of $3,000 a year. We knew that our trust would not be betrayed, and it wasn’t – despite the unusual hazards we were facing. We were building in boom times, in which the price of our door sash, for example, soared 30 per cent between the time we priced it and the day we finally bought it. We were up against a rush of building jobs in which contractors worked like circuit preachers – one day here the next day there. We had to buck the accepted way of doing things. And we roomed, boarded, and paid an apprentice from Mr. Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin, in addition to paying the architect’s fee.

All these things cost us at least two month’s delay while we tried to find a contractor, and more delay later.

Because the bids were so extravagantly high, we finally gave up on a general contractor, and let one for the brick and concrete work, another for the plumbing and heating, and hired a carpenter and his crew by the day. And that is risky business unless you know what you are doing. We didn’t but the apprentice, Gordon Chadwick, did. He was an efficient and watchful taskmaster. He did more actual work than any one man concerned with the building of that house. He was a sensitive and intelligent executor of the master’s plan. And as for the value of a dollar, Gordon knew it intimately, and saved us many of them. We feel a warm debt of gratitude to Gordon Chadwick.

We do also to the carpenter, Howard Rickert, one of the few men who understood what it was all about. After one careful study of the blueprints, he became enthusiastic. “This house,” he drawled, “is logical.”

As the construction proceed, he enlarged his verdict. “This,” he declared time and time again, “is the most logical house I ever built.”

There had been predictions, too, from men who claimed, actually, to be heating engineers, that the radiant heating wouldn’t work. There were others that the thin walls without studs would not stand long enough to permit completion of the structure, particularly in the part of the living area that was over eleven feet high. There were other baleful warnings that the walls would be cold on the inside; and that the concrete floors would be a dewy lake of condensation in the summer and a rink of frost in the winter.

ONE of the big thorns in the little minds of these critics (who milled about, taking pictures and notes, and wanting to see the detail drawings) was the ribbon of clearstory windows. The only support for the roof where they ran was a strut the size of your wrist placed every four feet, the width of a window unit. These struts were notched and merely tacked in place. They rode atop the wall, able to move with it. And to the practitioners of the Cape Cod school of architecture they were pure folly that God would strike down.

In March 1941 before our house was finished, we had the heaviest snowfall in nearly twenty years. I measured sixteen inches on the flat roof. And of course, as soon as the road back to our woods was open, there was another procession of architects to the scene of the anticipated disaster and triumph. What they didn’t know was that we had put up a test section of the wall because a building inspector had refused a permit. That wall had carried four times the maximum load it could ever be called upon to carry.

The other predictions were just as silly. The walls were never cold to the touch inside; there was never a drop of condensation, a crystal of frost, or any other moisture on our floors. In fact, although we were in the woods, we had less trouble with mould on books and shoes than did our friends in the town in conventional houses with cellars.

AS FOR the cost, we built it on the slim income of a newspaperman with one child and not a solitary extra asset. And we did it without incurring debt that any financing agency would say was beyond our means. But, of course, they didn’t help us incur it. Only the fact that the newspaper for which I worked financed home for its employees enabled us to build when we did.

We got an extraordinary house for an ordinary price and still paid the inevitable price for being pioneers in our area. And what’s more, our house came completely furnished: carpets, furniture, stove, and so forth, all for just about the cost of an ordinary one.

When we sold it recently, two small classified ads in Washington papers brought a deluge of shoppers. The house and yard were full for three days. The real estate agent said he had never been so besieged with prospects and telephone calls in his twenty-odd years of selling houses.

There were nearly a dozen bona-fide offers. One of the bidders even made a long-distance telephone call to relatives in Chicago to try to get help in meeting the price. He was a quiet young doctor who had had no previous interest in architecture. He was answering an ad for a house. But after looking at it, he said; “It makes you dissatisfied with everything else.”

And that comment, incidentally, was just one of hundreds of similar ones from friends and visitors from the day we moved in. At first, they had taken us by surprise, because we had expected very few to like our new-departure home in old Virginia. But so many of our friends (and relatives) changed from apprehension to envy that we came to expect the conversation as natural matter of aesthetic awakening.

Yet the lending agencies were skeptical. Some would not offer any kind of financing for the sale. The others offered considerably less than they would on a Cape Cod number. Yet we sold our house easily at our price, and could have raised it. The price was typical for these times – which means it was high. But we still are occasionally upbraided by friends for not having set it higher.

Thus, our house, which the lending agencies do not like, proved a far better investment financially than most ordinary houses would have. And twenty years from now it will be even better, because it will probably be the only really modern house in its area.

As our converted real estate agent observed in the midst of the scramble to buy it; “The lending public seems to be away behind the buying public.”

As for living, it was so far superior an investment that any other kind of house cannot be mentioned with it. It not only thrills one’s sense of beauty and shelter, but it has every virtue of practicality.

What make a house practical? Our guesses would be; ease of upkeep; ease of doing the necessary work in it; ease of living in it, or perfect comfort, and financial soundness.

THE near total absence of upkeep is one of the shinning attributes of our kind of house. There just ain’t no such animal as upkeep. Consider: there is no paint to be cleaned or to be done over every three or four years, at $500 or more per doing. There is no plaster – which also means no mess, no future dust storms while that is being repaired or done over. There are no wood floors to be refinished, re-sanded, or re-laid when warped or squeaky. There are none of the ills that plaster and paint are heir to in a bathroom where children try to reproduce a tropical storm. There are no termites, no rats. They can’t get into the solid walls, or gnaw through the concrete floor – although a procession of sylvan insects used to take a short cut across our living room floor on the way to see relatives before we got screens up and the woods pushed back for a lawn. The solid walls help make the house virtually fireproof. And the furnace burns in a double-walled brick room. (Editor’s note: Most frame construction creates a row of flues for fire drafts along every wall.)

You can spend a lot or a little on shrubbery. But about the only item you have to spend money for, in our house, is wax, and that is cheap and used only on the inside. Outside, the cypress boards are left to weather as they should, and to acquire the soft silvery gray patina that is one of the enchanting qualities of cypress.

Some of those things also contribute to the ease of doing housework. And we will accept no argument on our flat claim that it is the easiest house in the world to take care of. There are only these surfaces to be cleaned: waxed wood, waxed brick, waxed red concrete, plate glass, and textiles, such as cushions and carpet. There is no cleaning of streaked and sooted walls because radiant heat is clean heat. And the dust that does come in is easily vacuumed off the waxed wood. Even the penciling and crayoning of children are transient things. The concrete floor is just as simply kept. But no one has devised a solid-color carpet that can meet the test of youngsters. Our total area of plate glass is as quickly washed with a brush and rubber squeegee as one ordinary window with a lot of small panes.

THE kitchen is small and compact and everything is at hand. A meal can be prepared and the dishes washed and put away – and the clothes washed in the Bendix – almost without taking a step. And while Mother is busy in here, she can see through the house, out into the yard where children play.

In the bathroom, the wood walls – varnished here – shed water and splashings like a duck.

The simplicity and order of the whole plan make it just as easy to put things away as to scatter them. Things are in the wardrobes or their drawers because they are handy. The simplicity also gives a well-ordered look. For the most part, the interior just can’t be messy. Practically everything is built in, so there aren’t a lot of places for dust to gather.

For a long time we were somewhat baffled by comments form other young parents, who would observe: “Your house always looks so neat.” We finally realized it was because the house was uncluttered – the furniture looks as if it had grown in the room in just the place it should be. And a tangled pool of blocks, dolls, blankets, and trucks in the center of the living room carpet gives the impression of only a localized disorder.

IN THIS house, even the dog stays off the furniture – he prefers to sleep on the warm floor. Now it’s important that you understand about the warm floor. After living with radiant heat for six years our family will be satisfied with no other. There are warm floors on cold winter mornings. The air temperature is much lower than with most other systems, which means it is never stuffy or uncomfortable. The principal of radiant heat is that a warm surface does not absorb your body heat, hence you can have a lower air temperature. For example, we kept the thermostat at 63 degrees. Seventy is far too warm. And with this system, the temperature is consistent.

The hot water pipes don’t break or spring leaks. They are wrought iron, which will last longer than you will, and they were tested for leaks under pressure before the concrete was poured over them.

We believe that radiant heating is cheaper than other systems, although we had nothing to compare it with. With the large expanses of glass in our house, our oil bill was consistently less than that of one of our friends who had conventional house about the size of ours. Considering the comparative areas of glass in the two houses, our oil bill should have been much larger. In addition, our living room was more than eleven feet high.

However, with radiant floor heating and large glass areas, you need either full-length draperies or storm sash to cut the convection currents that are set up by large, cold expanses of glass, unless the sun is shinning through them.

We think it definitely is the heating system of the future.

And at the end of the day, your nerves are considerably less frayed. The solid concrete floors and the solid walls absorb much of the noisy coursings and clatter of children. We didn’t realize how important this was until we moved.

In the hot Virginia summer, it is the coolest house in the community. The clearstory windows at ceiling level carry off the hot air, and the layout of the openings in the house create a breeze.

The carport – which is just a cantilevered extension of the roof – lets one get to and from the car without getting wet. There will never be another garage for us.

The indirect lighting is pleasing and restful. And the house is so light that there is never any need for a lamp in the daytime, even in the gloomiest weather.

We lived in that house for six years. And we miss it as if we had left a member of our family behind. Even our five-year-old son protested: “But I don’t want to leave our little house.” Even the skeptics must concede that a house that can exert that spell over a test of time must have contributed something to the spiritual concept which is home.

The question that all this brings up is; “Why did we leave such a house?” The answer is; we moved to a farm, where we can have a larger Frank Lloyd Wright house for a larger family on a larger expanse of this beautiful green earth. And the farm, besides providing the better way of living, will help finance the house the lending agencies won’t like.

THIS postscript may shock some people: We are going to tear down our 150-year-old farmhouse, although an antiquarian could make himself a palace of it. It once was the home of the Lees of Virginia. But the house goes. We would no more trade living in a Wright house for it, than we would think of swapping our auto and tractor for their horses and slaves.

The short time we had to endure this now-intolerable, dead shell has made us only that much more sensitive to what we are missing until we get our new home. Our forerunners’ abode is monstrously unplanned and difficult to keep clean. It is a firetrap for our children. Its lifeless form shuts out all the beauty of our rolling, verdant fields and woods, and their purple backdrop, the Blue Ridge Mountains. Its only place is in a museum to show how far we’ve come toward fulfilling the human desire for a good, spiritually rewarding life.