Stay in a piece of design history
There’s no mistaking the pioneering style of America’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Now here’s your chance to stay in one of his legendary properties
In 1923 Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, described houses as “machines for living in.” It became the defining tenet of modernist residential architecture. But Frank Lloyd Wright, the other titan of 20th century architecture, couldn’t have agreed less.
While most modernists looked up and dreamed of gleaming glass towers and stacked apartments in residential blocks, Wright thought horizontally. From his early “Prairie Style” houses through to his late masterpieces, Wright created generous, stretched-out open spaces that had internal vistas and horizons.
In other words, homes for living in, rather than structures to be admired.
While others created stark white boxes, all but ignorant of their surroundings, Wright created houses of strata, outcrops and creeping cantilevered roofs in redbrick and wood, “organic architecture” that lived in nature.
The Guggenheim museum, overlooking New York’s Central Park, is perhaps Wright’s most famous building. But Fallingwater, set in the Laurel Highlands of southwest Pennsylvania and considered by many the finest house of the 20th century, is his masterpiece. Now on the UNESCO World Heritage List, it emerges out of the landscape as if divinely intended.
Wright was a singular architect, a difficult visionary who created open-hearted, human-scale houses. He was also prolific—he designed almost 1,000 structures, of which 400 were built—which means that the U.S. is dotted with fine Wright-designed houses of different vintages, some of them available to rent right here on Vrbo. We’re proud to be partners of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and to celebrate the month of his birthday, here are a few of our favorites.
01
Norman Lykes House
Phoenix, AZ
Sleeps 6
Frank Lloyd Wright lived to 89, and his last residential building is one of his best. Designed in 1959, just before he died, and completed in 1967 by architect John Rattenbury, an apprentice of Wright, the Norman Lykes House is 3,200 square feet of seamless, honey-stone concentric circles masterfully set into the hills of Arizona’s Palm Canyon.
The Circular Sun House, as it is also known, has three bedrooms—but the reason to be here is its sprawling entertaining spaces that flow onto large desert-view patios and around a crescent-shaped pool. It’s the perfect spot for reconnecting with family and friends.
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02
The Palmer House
Ann Arbor, MI
Sleeps 5
Set in two acres of woodland in Ann Arbor, the Palmer House is another late Wright masterpiece, an elegant equilateral triangle with a cantilevered wedge of roof creeping over the terrace. For all its sharp angles, the Palmer House is a near perfect example of Wright’s “organic architecture.” Surrounded by nature on all sides, its low-slung red brick and cypress form seems entirely at home and welcome.
Built on two levels, the three-bedroomed, three-winged, 2,000-square-foot house is fitted with similarly angular Wright-designed cabinetry and furniture. Completed in 1952, it also features its own tea house in the grounds, a nod to Wright’s life-long fascination with Japanese customs and architecture.
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03
The Cornwell House
Waimea, HI
Sleeps 6
The Cornwell House is the only Wright design to be built in Hawaii, and finally landed 35 years after his death. It was worth the wait.
Set above the Big Island’s Kohala Coast near Waimea, the 3,700-square-foot home features a long, curving sequence of towering glass doors opening to ocean and volcano views, and offers more open-air pleasures with green terraces, plentiful hammocks, and a lava-rock hot tub. Inside the house has three bedrooms and a huge entertaining space, with Wright-designed built-in seating and licensed reproductions of original free-standing furniture.
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04
The Elam House
Austin, MN
Sleeps 2
The Usonian Homes were perhaps Wright at his most utopian, a post-Great Depression model for highly crafted and uplifting affordable housing. The Elam House, completed in 1951 in Austin, Minnesota, is one of the largest surviving examples. And it offers the most affordable way of getting up close to one of Wright’s most iconic residential designs.
This home features five bedrooms, six bathrooms, three floor-to-ceiling fireplaces (a Wright trademark), soaring ceiling heights, 100 windows and, at Mr Elam’s request, an original Hammond organ in the main living room.
Unfortunately you can’t stay there as it’s a private house—but you can settle into its 820-square-foot, one-bedroom guest house. From there you can take in the main house’s meticulous stonework exterior, which took two years to complete, and its cantilevered balcony, supported by massive limestone pillars. Plus guest-house residents get a free and otherwise unavailable tour of the main building.
Nick Compton is a freelance writer and editor who writes about design, architecture, travel, technology and more. A contributing editor and former features director at Wallpaper* magazine, his work has appeared in numerous publications in the U.K. and U.S.
