Top 20+ Frank Lloyd Wright Houses That Changed America

Frank Lloyd Wright houses are more than just the output of one creative mind—they are the blueprint for so much of American architecture. Architect John Lautner said it best when he wrote that Wright “contributed so many ideas that there are details of work, each one of which could create a whole new architectural style,” in AD in 1971. Born in 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, Wright had a career that spanned 70 years, during which he designed more than 1,100 projects. Impressively, nearly half of them were realized.

Now over 60 years after his death, Wright remains America’s most famous architect. The reasons for this are plentiful: He was an out-of-the-box thinker, a shrewd marketer, a man that—for better or worse—attracted scandal, and, most importantly, a singular talent. “You hear about compression and release every time you go into a Frank Lloyd Wright house, but there are so many architects who use that technique,” John Waters, preservation programs director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, tells AD. “Wright just did it exceptionally well.”

But Wright was also mercurial: always reimagining, reinventing, and rethinking his work and approach. “When you look at [his projects] all at once, it’s astonishing that it was all done by one person,” Waters adds. This constant evolution made him a dynamic figure, someone who remained at the forefront of his field. He embraced technological advancement, new materials, and changing society—creating architecture that met the world in the present while pushing it into the future.

He designed a number of monumental public buildings, like the Guggenheim, the Johnson Wax Headquarters, and the Marin County Civic Center, to name a few. But the best way to understand Wright’s impact is to look at his residential projects. Not only were these commissions where he largely got his start, but they are also a roadmap of his personal movements and periods. Below, explore 20 Frank Lloyd Wright houses that redefined American architecture.

In 1887, a 20-year-old Wright arrived in Chicago, a city that, like the young man, was on the brink of a metamorphosis. Just six years earlier, the Great Chicago Fire had destroyed more than three square miles of the metropolis, and a major rebuilding was underway. Wright had studied civil engineering at the University of Madison and worked as an assistant to Allan Conover, an engineering professor, but left the program before finishing his degree in pursuit of becoming an architect.

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[I] “took the city directory of architects,” Wright wrote in his autobiography. “Choosing names I’d heard in Conover’s office or names that sounded interesting.” After several interviews, he was hired as a draftsman with Joseph Lyman Silsbee, where he worked for a little under a year. In 1888, Wright was offered a job at Adler & Sullivan, among the most prestigious firms in Chicago at the time. “They were foremost in Chicago. Radical—going strong on independent lines,” Wright wrote about the firm. Though he describes altercations with other draftsmen in his autobiography, he was mentored by Louis Sullivan, who eventually promoted him to head draftsman.

He married his first wife, Catherine Tobin, the following year, and Sullivan lent the young architect money to design and build a family home. But Wright was regularly in need of extra money, by his own admission due to expensive taste, and he began taking on freelance commissions on the side. Known as “bootleg” homes, these projects were not allowed under Wright’s contract. It’s unclear whether he quit or was fired, but in 1893 he left Sullivan’s firm.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois.

With money from his mentor, Wright began building what would become his family home in 1889. Located in Oak Park, a quiet neighborhood in Chicago, the residence was originally quite modest with a primary bedroom, nursery, and work space. He later expanded the home in 1895 and again in 1898, when he added a studio wing to the residence.

Wright’s family posing for a photo on the steps of his Oak Park home. From left, Jenkin Lloyd-Jones, Jenkin’s wife, Jane Wright, Catherine Wright (Lloyd Wright in her arms), Anna Lloyd Wright, Maginel Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jenkin's daughter.

A historic photo shows the dining room in the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. Wright also designed the table, chairs, and light screen.

The exterior was inspired by Shingle-style homes, which were popular among wealthy East Coast families. While it was designed well before Wright defined his singular point of view, there are glimpses of motifs he would develop throughout his career. The pronounced geometric forms that punctuate the façade—seen in the prominent triangular gable and circular veranda—showcase his early thinking about shape and form. Inside, the playroom, which was part of the 1895 addition, is particularly striking. Its barrel-vaulted ceiling and bays of leaded glass windows create a spacious, light-filled room. Accessible though a relatively cramped area, it’s an early example of Wright’s compression and release technique.

The Shingle-style home shows Wright’s early interest in bold geometric forms.

Today the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio is a house museum and open to the public for tours. Wright and Tobin separated in 1909, and the home was eventually sold to owners who divided the building into six units. In 1974, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation purchased the residence and undertook a massive renovation to restore the home to its former state.

The Parker House was one of Wright’s bootleg homes that he worked on in secret while employed at Adler + SUllivan.

Like Wright’s own Oak Park home, the Parker House is an early exploration of geometric forms in residential design, defined by a large octagonal turret. It was one of the architect’s bootleg homes, and most closely resembles a Queen Anne Victorian, which were popular at the time. However, there are pieces that are very clearly Wright. Generally, it has more rounded forms than other Queen Annes, while Sullivan’s ideas about “geometric simplification” is evident in the façade.

“There’s no escaping Wright’s presence,” Glenn Burr, who owns the home with his wife, Katie Sweet, previously told AD about living in the Frank Lloyd Wright house. “There’s so much to come from his work, and you get to see and experience the very beginning.” The band of windows in the octagonal turret are particularly Wright-esque. “At 8 p.m. darkness is only just starting to creep in, and there are spectacular sunsets to the Northwest, and you just get immersed in it,” Burr said.

After leaving Adler & Sullivan, Wright formed his own practice and began taking on more commissions around the Chicago area. “It was a time of great experimentation for him,” Waters, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy director, says. “He was trying different styles and ideas, and was also, to a certain extent, beholden to the desires of his early clients.”

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It was during this point that Wright and a group of young, progressive architects began developing what came to be known as the Prairie style. These designers, which included visionaries such as Marion Mahony, Dwight Perkins, George Grant Elmslie, and Walter Burley Griffin, were all inspired by Louis Sullivan. Much of the aesthetic was defined by long-slung, horizontal homes that were intended to emulate the graceful expanse of the midwest Prairie. Though Wright remains the most recognizable practitioner of the movement, he was far from the only one.

Victorian architecture was popular around this time, and Prairie-style homes were significantly simpler. They are often identifiable by their “horizontal emphasis of the overall design, low-sloped roofs with broad cantilevering eaves, and banded window grouping,” says Waters. Often, these homes do not have basements, and the major rooms are on the second floors, while service rooms are on the first floor. However, this isn’t always the case. “There is a greater amount of ornamentation than later periods of Wright’s work, though art glass, applied wood trim, and sometimes sculpture,” Waters adds. “Connection with the exterior is often accomplished by open decks or covered verandas that reach out into the surrounding environment.”

Wright called the Willis House the “first Prairie house.”

The Winslow House was Wright’s first major commission as an independent architect, designed when he was just 26. Later in 1936, he described it as the “first Prairie house.” The gently sloped roof, overhanging eaves, and symmetrical façade all point towards what would develop into Wright’s Prairie style. The exterior is divided into three horizontal sections: one from stone, then brick, and finally a terra-cotta frieze.

The original owner, William Winslow, manufactured decorative ironwork and had met Wright through his work at Adler & Sullivan. The home was sold in late 2024 following an extensive renovation.

The Warren Hickox House was built next to the Bradley House, another Wright design.

Commissioned by an Illinois couple, Laura and Warren Hickox, this early Prairie-style home is located in Kankakee. It sits next to another Wright design, the Bradley House, which was built for Warren’s sister, Anna, and her husband, B. Harley Bradley. “Around 1900, when Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Hickox House, he was experimenting and pushing boundaries,” says Victoria Krause Schutte, a broker at @properties Christie’s International Real Estate, who recently represented the home when it sold earlier this year. “He was moving away from the ornate, compartmentalized Victorian style and beginning to shape what would soon become his signature Prairie period.”

The home was listed for sale in 2024 for the first time in 50 years.

There are still touches of a Victorian exploration, but a distinct Prairie perspective shines through in the lower pitched roofline, overhanging eaves, and horizontal patterns in the art glass. According to Krause Schutte, the fireplace is among the most striking elements of the home. Located on the first floor, it anchors the open layout and was meant to be the central heart of the home. “Wright was already thinking about how people lived, how they interacted, and he designed the space to support connection and flow,” she says. “These early ideas would go on to shape some of his most iconic work—but you can see the seeds of it all right here.”

Many ideas that Wright continued to explore in later Prairie homes are visible in the Warren Hickox house.

She also points to the home’s art glass, as the Warren Hickox House was among the first in which Wright implemented this detail. Not only are they a point of beauty, but they shape the light and mood of the residence. “The leaded art glass windows filter it in a way that feels almost magical—it’s always shifting, always dynamic,” she explains. “Hickox might not get the same spotlight as some of Wright’s later masterpieces, but it’s truly a gem—and such a standout in his body of work. It captures this exciting turning point in his career, where he continued to move away from old traditions and invent a whole new architectural language.”

The Willits House was among the first completed homes showcasing Wright’s mature Prairie style.

“Nineteen hundred was a turning point year,” Waters says. “This is when the mature Prairie style really emerged.” Perhaps nothing exemplifies that quite like the Willits House. Until this point, most of Wright’s work was built on city lots, the Willits plot gave the young architect the space to express the horizontality that he later became known for to its full extent.

The large plot of land allowed Wright to fully explore the horizontality of Prairie designs.

The residence resembles a plan and article Wright wrote in a 1901 edition of Ladies Home Journal titled “A Home in a Prairie Town.” Writing about the design, he noted that it “recognizes the influence of the prairie, [and] is firmly and broadly associated with the site.” The home is anchored by a central brick fireplace, from which four wings extend in a cross-like shape.

The Martin House in Buffalo, New York.

Spanning nearly 30,000 square feet across six structures, the Martin House estate is one of Wright’s largest residences and a “prime example of Wright’s architecture at the height of his Prairie period,” says Jessie Fisher, CEO at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House. “It is characterized by its low profile, cruciform plan, spatial openness, pronounced horizontality, and dramatic pier and cantilever construction.”

The entire Martin complex spans 30,000 square feet and includes six structures.

“The Martin House gave Wright unique freedom and space to experiment with his ideas. Unlike his previous work in Chicago, Wright was able to personally select the lot for the Martins’ house,” Fisher says. “With one and a half acres nestled in the historic Parkside neighborhood at his disposal, Wright was able to fully explore the compositional possibilities of his Prairie house style.”

Wright was able to select the land where the Martin House was built.

In addition to the nearly 15,000-square-foot main residence, the campus includes the Barton House (another Wright residence), a conservatory, pergola, carriage house, and gardener’s cottage. “The surrounding Queen Anne and Tudor homes were all here when Wright was designing the house, which makes the result even more iconoclastic and impressive,” Fisher adds. “He was creating his own brand of American architecture.”

The Robie House has been used for a number of purposes over the years, though is now a house museum.

Today, the Robie House is a National Historic Landmark—and Wright’s personal advocacy for the home is a primary reason. In both 1941 and 1957, the residence was at risk of demolition, and in each instance the architect campaigned to save it. He called it a “cornerstone of American architecture,” and it remained one of his favorite creations. It wasn’t just Wright, though, that recognized its merit: In 1991, the American Institute of Architects named the home one of the 10 most important structures of the 20th century.

Wright, seen here in the Robie House, campaigned to save the home when it was at risk of demolition.

Frederick C. Robie, a manufacturing executive, commissioned the home. However, he and his family only lived there for 14 months, as he was forced to sell the property to settle debts. The Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy calls the home “the most innovative and forward-thinking of all Wright’s Prairie houses,” adding that he “achieves a dynamic balance between transparency and enclosure, blurring the boundaries between interior space and the world of nature beyond.”

The Robie House is considered one of the best manifestations of Wright’s Prairie principles.

Two other families owned the residence following the Robies, and it was later used as a classroom, dormitory, refectory, and office for a number of businesses. Today, the University of Chicago owns the home, which is available to tour.

Wright called this iteration of his home Taliesin III after rebuilding it following a second fire.

Like Wright, Taliesin was a product of constant transformation. Wright designed it in 1911 following a personal scandal—two years earlier, he had fled to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Chenney, a neighbor and wife of a client, after their affair had been made public. Effectively ousted from Chicago society, Wright turned to the hills in his home state, building a refuge and new studio for him and Borthwick Chenney.

Wright and his third wife, Olgivanna, listen to a musical performance with apprentices at Taliesin.

“When Taliesin was built, Wright had long been moving away from the rigid Victorian layout, aiming for open layout interiors that blended with the landscape,” Elizabeth Maske, communications coordinator at Taliesin Preservation, tells AD. The residence is built into the surrounding slopes, constructed from local materials including limestone from a nearby quarry and sand from the Wisconsin River. “It exemplifies Prairie style through its strong horizontal lines, low-pitched roofs, open floor plan, and bands of windows that connect the interior to the landscape,” Maske adds.

Taliesin is located in the Wisconsin hills in an area known as the Driftless Region.

But Taleisin was never stagnant. It was rebuilt twice—once in 1914 and again in 1925—following fires at the estate. The architect also used it as his personal laboratory and would test out ideas at the property before implementing them into client’s homes. “Wright’s career spanned over 70 years—from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of space exploration,” Caroline Hamblen, director of programs at Taliesin Preservation, says. “Many new inventions, techniques, and materials were developed between 1911 and 1959 and can be traced back to Taliesin.” This ongoing evolution epitomizes Wright’s ideas about organic architecture, which he believed should change over time.

Wright with a number of his apprentices in the drafting studio at Taliesin.

“Taliesin is deeply personal—it was Wright’s own home, studio, and experimental laboratory for his ideas,” Maske says. It was also where he later began his Taliesin Fellowship, his apprenticeship program. Today, the home is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and open to guests for tours and workshops. “Taliesin is the epicenter of Wright’s ideas and often referred to as his autobiography in wood and stone,” Hamblen says.

Beginning in 1911, Wright began developing his America System-Built homes, which were intended to be affordable and are an early example of prefab housing. Wright partnered with Arthur L. Richards, who manufactured and distributed the homes, though they were only offered commercially for 14 months. The men ended their business relationship in 1917 and only around 20 of these residences were ever built.

Burnham Block in Milwaukee is comprised of a number of American System-Built Homes.

Richards built six American System-Built homes on Burnham Street in Milwaukee between 1915 and 1916 as part of a demonstrative neighborhood. Now known as Burnham Block, the collection includes four model 7A duplexes, a model B1 bungalow, and a model C3 bungalow. Today, the nonprofit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Burnham Block offers regular tours of two of the homes.

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Taliesin was the site for some of Wright’s biggest professional accomplishments, but it was also a location of deep personal tragedy. In 1914, Julian Carlton, an employee at the property, lit the home on fire and murdered Borthwick Cheney, her children, and four others. At the time, Wright had been away supervising work at Midway Gardens in Chicago. The architect rebuilt his home in Borthwick Cheney’s memory, then effectively abandoned it for nearly a decade, taking commissions in Japan, California, and elsewhere.

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“When he came to California, I think it’s where he thought he would remake himself,” Waters says. “But that didn’t really happen.” During this time, however, he did design a collection of monumental projects in Los Angeles, many of which were made from a series of individual concrete blocks. Known as his textile block system, these precast pieces were both structural and decorative devices, creating a more dynamic design compared to a singular monolithic structure. “The blocks could be made on the site, and Wright thought this could lower construction costs,” Waters adds.

There is also evidence to suggest that the Panama California Exposition in San Diego, which took place in 1915, could have also inspired the design. The event celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, and in addition to buildings in the Spanish colonial revival style, the exhibit showcased photographs of Mayan and Aztec buildings. These California homes were among the very few commissions Wright worked on between 1922 and 1934, partly due to his declining reputation from the Taliesin murders and his extramarital affair and partly due to the Great Depression.

The living room in the Hollyhock House.

Commissioned by Aline Barnsdall, an oil heiress, the Hollyhock House was Wright’s first Los Angeles project. “He first met Barnsdall in the Chicago area around 1915,” says Abbey Chamberlain Brach, Hollyhock House’s director and curator. “She approached him about building a theater, but she hadn’t yet purchased a property. In 1918, she bought a 36-acre hilltop plot on Hollywood’s eastern edge, and the scope of the commission grew immensely.”

Aline Barnsdall donated the Hollyhock House and its surrounding land to the city of Los Angeles.

Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Barnsdall wanted a complex that would include a theater for her to produce avant-garde plays, artist studios, shops, a cinema director’s house, a structure called the Actor’s Abode, a house for her, and two additional guest houses. However, many of these ideas were never realized, as construction of the main house and guest houses went significantly over budget. “Barnsdall largely pulled the plug after these structures were realized in 1921,” Chamberlain Brach says.

Steps leading to the patio in the Hollyhock House.

A dining area in the Hollyhock House.

For the patron’s home, Wright included a number of hollyhock-inspired motifs, given they were Barnsdall’s favorite flowers. He described the design as California Romanza, borrowing from a musical term that refers to a piece with a romantic quality, rather than a specific form.

“You see so much of Wright’s vision of California here,” Chamberlain Brach adds. “The project reflects California’s natural beauty and the kind of creative freedom both Wright and Barnsdall were seeking when they came to the state.” Pre-dating the textile block system, the home demonstrates Wright’s emerging interest and influence from Mayan, Aztec, Japanese, and Egyptian architecture. “Wright never really acknowledged outside influences on his work, but there’s no denying these references,” says Chamberlain Brach.

Today, the Hollyhock House is the centerpiece of Barnsdall Art Park.

In an interview with the LA Times, Jeffrey Herr, Hollyhock’s curator emeritus, described the home as the first of Wright’s “post-Prairie-style period.” For Chamberlain Brach, the residence captures a moment of experimentation as Wright reflected on what his next act might look like. “This house is very different from his Prairie style; I think he was trying to figure out what living in California should look like. It speaks to a period of creative freedom for Wright when he wasn’t getting as many commissions, but experimenting with which direction he would go next.”

It’s not just architectural circles in which the Ennis House carries a certain cachet, but in cinematic ones too. In fact, the home has made more than 80 onscreen appearances since it was built in 1924. (It’s far from the only Wright building to be featured in films, though.) “It is one of the most recognizable homes in the hills of Los Angeles,” said Rayni Williams, the home’s listing agent, in a 2019 AD video tour when the property was for sale.

The Ennis House has made over 80 onscreen appearances.

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Designed in 1923, the residence was commissioned by Charles and Mabel Ennis. It was the fourth and largest of Wright California textile block homes, constructed from more than 27,000 blocks. According to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, “the Ennis House is unusually monumental and vertical for a Wright residence, but when the architect completed it in 1924 he immediately considered it his favorite.” In each of the textile block homes, Wright created a unique motif for the blocks. At the Ennis House, the abstract design appears to resemble a G, which the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation theorizes could be symbolic of a Masonic order to which Charles Ennis belonged.

The residence was also among Wright’s first to include corner windows, in which the glass meets at the corner, creating a nearly invisible joint. “This is very difficult to do today, so you can imagine how difficult it was in the ’20s,” Williams said.

The textile blocks create a continuous motif inside and outside the home.

In 1980, the home’s eighth owner, Augustus O. Brown, donated the residence to a nonprofit known as the Trust for Preservation of Cultural Heritage, later renamed the Ennis House Foundation. It was during the foundation’s ownership that the home was used as a filming location, appearing in films and shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mulholland Drive, and Rush Hour. The Ennis House Foundation sold the home to Ron Burkle in 2011 for $4.5 million. In 2019, it was sold to an LLC connected to cannabis industry professionals Robert Rosenheck and Cindy Capobianco, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“Organic architecture is an architecture from within outward, in harmony with the conditions of its being,” Wright explained in a 1914 edition of Architectural Record. The ideas of organic architecture was a concept he revisited many times throughout his life, first mentioned as early as 1908. For him, it wasn’t just about architecture in harmony with nature—although that was a part of it—but a reinterpretation of nature’s principles. An organic design was “a sentient, rational building that would owe its ‘style’ to the integrity with which it was individually fashioned to serve its particular purpose.”

In earnest, defining organic architecture is difficult to do. As Stuart Graff, the former president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, wrote in a blog post, even Wright himself struggled to synthesize his ideas. “Wright defined organic architecture many different ways—sometimes contradicting himself—many different times throughout his life,” Waters adds. Though challenging to characterize, there are a number of projects that are often celebrated as the pinnacle of Wright’s organic architecture.

Commissioned by the Kaufmann family, Fallingwater is largely considered Wright’s masterpiece.

Located about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, Fallingwater is often considered Wright’s masterpiece. “It has been called the best all-time work of American architecture and is unquestionably one of the most famous private residences ever built,” says Justin Gunther, the vice president of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and director of Fallingwater.

A historic photo shows the living room in Fallingwater.

The National Historic Landmark was built for Lillian and Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., patrons of modern architecture and department store owners. Designed to cantilever over a waterfall, it was this home—along with Johnson Wax Building in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Herbert Jacobs’s First House in Madison, Wisconsin—that largely put the architect back on the map, reviving his career.

“Fallingwater was put on the cover of Time magazine in 1938,” Waters says. “That gave him a lot of exposure.” Bold in its design, this did not come without challenges. The property was known to leak when the Kaufmanns lived there, and is currently undergoing a $7 million repair project to fix these same problems nearly 90 years later.

Fallingwater cantilevers over a waterfall.

The Kaufmann family used it as their weekend home for 26 years, and in 1863 Edgar Kaufmann Jr., the son of Lillian and Edgar Sr., announced that he would donate the property to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy for it to be operated as a house museum.

“Perhaps better than any other single work, Fallingwater exemplifies Wright’s concept of organic architecture as the harmonious union of architecture and nature,” says Gunther. ”At once seemingly an outgrowth of the land and a striking counterpoint to it, a natural formation and a daring tour de force, Fallingwater’s dramatic engagement with its sloping terrain uses cantilevered forms to create a dynamic three-dimensionality that stretched the capabilities of technology and design for its time.”

Taliesin West was Wright’s desert laboratory and winter home.

The land was completely undeveloped when Wright’s apprentices arrived at the site of what would become Taliesin West. “Looking for an escape from the harsh Wisconsin winters for himself and the Taliesin Fellowship, Wright recalled the wonderful weather in Phoenix, having spent a few months there in 1928 consulting on the construction of the Arizona Biltmore,” explains Fred Prozzillo, the Nord McClintock family vice president of preservation and collections at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. “On Christmas Eve 1937, he boarded a train and headed for the Valley of the Sun to select a property.” Once he found a plot of land that met his needs, he sent a telegram back to Taliesin. “He instructed [his apprentices] to head for the desert to start construction of Taliesin West, what was to be his architectural laboratory and winter camp.”

The Garden Room, which was once a part of the Wright’s living quarters and used for social receptions.

Much of the home is built from the very land that surrounds it using what Wright called desert masonry, which was formed with local rock set in wood frames and held together by cement and sand. “This building technique truly links the structure to the site. Then, to celebrate the desert environment, canvas roofs were placed atop the massive walls to create great tent-like pavilions,” Prozillo says.

The home and studio expanded over the years, eventually comprising Wright’s private living quarters, residences for apprentices and staff, a drafting studio, three theaters, and workshop, and dining facilities. “Wright’s wife said the construction of Taliesin West felt more like excavation than construction, as if they found ruins where they could place ephemeral roofs to create enclosure for the winter. Because of this I believe Taliesin West to be Wright’s greatest example of organic architecture,” Prozillo adds.

Taliesin West was built from what Wright called “desert masonry.”

Each winter, Wright and his apprentices would caravan from Spring Green to Scottsdale to continue their work in warmer weather. Following Wright’s death, the property was left to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which he and his third wife, Olgivanna, had started in 1940. Today, it’s still managed by the foundation, which is headquartered in the estate. “Taliesin West was more than just a personal home; it was home to a community that came together around a common cause: architecture and the arts,” Prozillo says. “Wright was creating a building that supports all that is needed for people to come together to work, learn, play, and live.”

Wright wasn’t just an architect concerned with designing beautiful buildings, but those that responded to the needs of society. After the Great Depression, he was particularly interested in affordable housing for the middle class. These residences came to be known as Usonian houses, a term Wright used to mean “of these United States.” “Beginning with the System-Built homes, Wright was particularly interested in beautiful homes for the everyday person,” Waters adds.

Compared to Prairie residences, Usonians tend to have fewer decorative elements. They’re also usually smaller, around 1,200 square feet. “You tend to see a lot of folds in Usonians,” Waters adds. “The buildings turn in many places. This was done for both structural and design reasons, and the Usonians often showcase that kind of efficiency.” Many Usonians ended up going over budget, so they weren’t always the inexpensive projects he’d hoped, but were generally more affordable than some of his earlier commissions.

The Pope-Lieghey House is small and efficient, representing Wright’s Usonian ideals.

Walking up to the Pope-Leighey House, it’s the home’s size that immediately stands out to many guests. “It is so much smaller than what many visitors are accustomed to when visiting a Wright site,” says Elizabeth Reese, senior manager of public programs and interpretation at the Pope-Leighey House. It’s “a much smaller, more modest example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, which exemplifies the core Usonian ideals of middle-class American living,” she adds.

Designed in 1939, the residence was commissioned by Loren Pope, a copy editor at the Washington Evening Star. He wrote Wright a six-page letter asking the architect to create a home for him, to which Wright responded in a significantly more brief manner, simply stating, “Of course I am ready to give you a house.” Pope was inspired by a different one of Wright’s residences, the Herbert Jacobs House, and budgeted $5,500 for a 1,800-square-foot home (roughly $124,000 today). In the end, the house cost between $7,000–$8,000 (about $158,000–$181,000 today) and is 1,200 square feet.

The Pope-Leighey house was moved from its original site after it was at risk of demolition due to an intersection expansion.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Zimmerman House.

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“At Pope-Leighey, you can really sense how Wright wanted people to live in the homes he designed at this stage in his career,” Reese adds. “For example, there is a bookshelf used as a headboard in the main bedroom, which indicates that reading and social activities should be done in the living room, with more natural light and higher ceilings.” Other characteristics of the home include a smaller primary bedroom and large children’s bedroom, suggesting that Wright envisioned the second space as ones for curiosity, play, and education. Wright also used compression and release throughout the home, which “squeezes people in nonsocial spaces and pushes you into social spaces,” Reese explains. “It’s very powerful in such a small home.”

The home was built in Falls Church, Virginia, and occupied by the Pope family until 1947, at which point it was sold to Marjorie and Robert Leighey. In 1960, Marjorie received a notice that her home was in the path of planned interstate expansion. “She immediately went to work and rallied the community, local and federal government officials, and supporters to prevent her home from being torn down,” Reese says. “Her reason was not solely herself, but she had the foresight to know what the preservation of this house would mean for the future.” Five years later, the home was disassembled and carefully moved to Alexandria, Virginia, to the grounds of Woodlawn, a historic house museum once part of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. “Her work inspired the Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the nation’s first federal preservation legislation,” Reese says.

The Laurent House is the only Wright design that is wheelchair accessible.

In 1948, Phyllis Laurent read an article in House Beautiful by Loren Pope, describing the love he had for the home Wright designed for his family. “She was very intrigued and she shared it with her husband, Kenneth Laurent,” explains Mary Beth Peterson, the executive director of the Laurent House. Just two years earlier, Kenneth had been diagnosed with a tumor on his spinal cord, which left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Ken decided to write Wright a letter. “He was very specific about the width of the doorways, how wide the shower should be, and the turning radius of the wheelchair. He wrote that he wanted to move through the living with the ease of a person walking, so he didn’t have to inconvenience guests to rise and move their chairs for him to get through. The Laurent House is what Wright gave them in return,” Peterson says. Today, the Laurent House remains the only residence he designed to be wheelchair accessible.

The home was designed 40 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law.

The home is one level, and all doorways and hallways are extra wide. Wright didn’t use any thresholds and designed lower furniture so it would be accessible from a wheelchair’s height. Further, he created accessible storage, with built-in cabinets with fold-down doors, among other modifications. This, of course, was all integrated into Wright’s classic style: The home is made from brick and red tidewater cypress, with concrete floors and plaster ceilings.

The home is one of Wright’s hemicycle designs.

“There’s nothing there that would’ve reminded Ken that he was paralyzed. There are no ramps, no grab bars; he could have complete freedom,” Peterson says. “I love whenever we get a chance to give a tour to someone who uses a wheelchair. Sometimes they get tears in their eyes when experiencing the space for themselves.” After living in the home, Kenneth wrote to Wright, saying the residence allowed him “to forget about my disabilities and focus on my capabilities.”

Kentuck Knob is made from native sandstone and Tidewater Red Cypress.

In 1940, Edgard J. Kaufmann, Wright’s Fallingwater patron, approached a local ice cream company owner, I.N. Hagan, about a business opportunity. “A friendship blossomed between the two men, and Mr. Kaufmann invited Mr. Hagan (along with his wife, Bernardine Hagan) to visit him at his nearby weekend retreat, Fallingwater,” says Timothy Fischer, the manager of Kentuck Knobb. The Hagans continued to visit Fallingwater over the years, and eventually asked the Kaufmanns if they thought Wright would design a home for them. “Mr. Kaufmann encouraged the Hagans to call Wright, and warned them to only tell Mr. Wright half of what they’d like to spend on the project,” Fischer adds. In 1954, the architect completed designs for a Usonian home constructed from local sandstone and imported tidewater red cypress, with a copper roof.

According to Fischer, Wright interviewed the Hagans extensively about their hobbies, habits, and interests to design the home to their needs. “Although he was infamous for his stubborn nature and his unwavering belief in the correctness of his own opinions, in reality, he was tremendously accommodating to clients like the Hagans when they requested changes and revisions to the drawings (enough changes to expand the floor plan from its original 1,200 square feet up to 2,200 square feet),” he says. “Perhaps he was softening just a bit in his old age.”

A stone fireplace anchors the living room at Kentuck Knob.

Among the Usonians, Kentuck Knobb is unique in its floor plan, which is based on a grid of overlapping parallelograms. “Those overlapping shapes create hexagons and triangle shapes within the design,” Fischer says. “Most of Wright’s Usonian houses are designed on a grid of one particular shape.” The residence is integrated into its landscape, with a horizontal central from which two wings of the house emerge—one side for bedrooms and bathrooms and the other for entertaining with the living room and dining room.

Currently, Lord Peter Palumbo owns the home; he purchased it from the Hagans in 1986. In 1996, the Palumbo family opened the residence to the public as an architectural museum. “After spending time in the house, guests at Kentuck Knob remark on the livability of it. It feels warm and inviting and comfortable, in defiance of the expectations of modernist architecture,” Fischer says.

Tirranna, also known as the John L. Rayward House, was among the last residential projects Wright worked on before his death in 1959. “When I walked into the space, it really made my heart race a little bit, because it’s a beautiful intersection of this sweeping curve of the solar hemicycle and this rectilinear design,” Stuart Graff, the previous CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, said to AD in a video tour of the home. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a Frank Lloyd Wright property in the same way.”

The 7,000-square-foot Usonian home was commissioned by Joyce and John Rayward and is built from concrete blocks, glass, and timber. As Graff described in the tour, its most defining feature is its curved, semicircular living room, which Wright called a solar hemicycle since the shape was designed to follow the path of the sun. “The curve faces east, that means it’s gathering the morning light. As the sun moves through the sky, the light in the room continuously spreads and expands, illuminating the space not only with that natural light, but also the warmth of the sun,” Graff explained. “It’s even an early form of sustainable design, because the sun is being used to heat the space, especially in winter.”

The residence is one of the largest Usonians and includes seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and a rooftop observatory. In 1964 after Wright’s death, a subsequent owner, Herman R. Shepherd, hired Taliesin Associated Architects to expand the property. While working on the Guggenheim Museum, Wright briefly stayed at Tiranna to enjoy a nature escape from New York City.

One of Wright’s most famous designs is the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, notable for its spiral ramp and radical cylindrical shape. Indeed, the museum’s curved walls were abhorred by many artists, as they felt it would detract from the artwork. Over time, opinions changed, and it’s now largely considered a landmark of modernist architecture.

But the museum was not the only place Wright experimented with circular forms. It was a shape he explored in residential designs too, many of which were built towards the end of his life.

Toyhill, also known as the Friedman House, is located in Usonia, New York.

About an hour outside of Manhattan, a collection of midcentury homes sit in harmony among soft sloping hills and dense verdant trees. This is Usonia, a historic district and Wright-planned community in Pleasantville, New York. In the mid 1940s, a group of city dwellers were inspired by Wright’s ideas about organic architecture and approached him about a cooperative neighborhood they hoped to form. “Wright himself had a direct hand in shaping the master plan, laying out the roads and parcels of land with characteristic intent,” says Jeffery Renz, founder of Ready to Hang. The architect even designed a few homes in the new community, including Friedman House, also known as Toyhill, which Renz’s family owns.

“Frank Lloyd Wright designed or built at least 10 homes incorporating significant circular or semicircular elements, but the Friedman House stands out among them for its bold use of two overlapping irregular cylinders, a complex roof structure, and strikingly innovative windows,” Renz adds. “Within its modest 2,150-square-foot footprint, the house cleverly integrates wedge-shaped spaces that present a unique design challenge. This challenge is elegantly addressed through the use of beautifully crafted, built-in furniture that enhances both the functionality and aesthetics of the space.”

Many visitors are also taken by the home’s unique carport, which mimics the form of the home. Built from stone masonry, the cover bears a certain resemblance to the ceiling in Wright’s Johnson Wax Building. “The carport emerges as an unexpected yet compelling architectural element, piquing curiosity and leaving a lasting impression,” Renz adds.

The entrance to the David and Gladys Wright House starts with a spiral ramp, an appropriate motif to welcome visitors into a circular home. “Spirals are fascinating forms. They can symbolize the infinite or longevity,” Stuart Graff said in an AD video tour of the property. “At the David and Gladys Wright House, the spiral takes on a unique sense of longevity as it moves from one generation, father, to the next generation, son.”

Wright designed the residence in 1950 for his fourth son David and his daughter-in-law Gladys, who lived in the home until their respective deaths in 1997 and 2008. Located in Phoenix’s Arcadia neighborhood, the architect opted to place the home on seven piers so that the couple would be able to see above the surrounding orange trees, which covered the area at the time of construction. Spanning 2,553 square feet, the interior includes three bedrooms and four bathrooms, with each room arranged in an “in-line plan,” rooms arranged in continuous succession. The circular home surrounds an interior courtyard, which included a pool, though it has since been filled in.

“We could actually start in one of those carports and make a continuous spiral up the ramp, through the entry, through the living room, down the hallway, and into the [primary] bedroom, without ever breaking that continuous curve,” Graff explained in the video.

After Gladys died, the home fell into a state of disrepair, as it changed hands among different owners. At one point, a developer purchased the residence with the intention to raze it. Luckily, it was saved, and in 2020, architect Bing Hu and his wife, Winchin Shi, bought the residence with plans to restore it with one of their daughters, Amanda. “It’s been a really interesting—and cherished—experience working with my dad. I feel like I've learned so much about him and it’s explained [by] just seeing him at work and how he makes his decisions,” Amanda said in the video.

Designed in 1959, the Circular Sun House, also known as the Norman Lykes House, is often considered Wright’s final design. Though unlike the David and Gladys Wright House, which is designed as a continuous spiral shape, the Circular Sun House is configured as a series of overlapping concentric circles. “This home is a piece of architecture and art, commissioned by Norman and Aimee Lykes in 1958,” Deanna Peters, the home’s listing agent, said in a 2021 AD video tour. “It sits…on a mountain and has views from every window.”

The Circular Sun House was Wright’s final residential commission.

The home remains one of Wright’s best examples of organic architecture and appears embedded into the rocky desert landscape. Defined by a dusty-rose-tinted concrete exterior, the residence is two stories, with the living spaces on the main level and the bedrooms on the second story.

In 1994, the home underwent an extensive renovation, which was approved by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Its then owner, Linda Melton, who bought the home from the Lykes family, hired John Rattenbury, a Taleisin apprentice who had overseen the home’s original construction following Wright’s passing, to work on the updates. Through this, the home’s original five bedrooms were converted into three, a swimming pool was added, and the original windows were replaced. Additionally, new heating, ventilation, and AC systems were installed.

The home frames views of the desert.

The home has been on and off the market since 2020, and is currently one of many Frank Lloyd Wright Airbnbs available to rent. However, it is still available to purchase for $8.95 million.