One of the three Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the Puget Sound area is on the market, a perfect time to wander through it and wonder why its ideas are being neglected in this century’s thirst for reasonably priced, modestly scaled homes.
Although the asking price of just under $2 million is a giant step out of the middle-class leagues, this house wasn’t conceived as a baronial estate. Original owners Ray and Mimi Brandes wrote to Wright in 1951, asking him to design a small house for a “simple unaffected servant-less life.” Jack Cullen, Ray Brandes’ stepson and the present owner, says they never envisioned it as a showcase for their contracting business.
It was, though for a reason they didn’t expect. “He said it was the most complex project he’d ever built,” says Cullen.
This is one of Wright’s 50-odd Usonian houses, a brand the architect devised in the 1930s and continued to design until his death in 1959. “Usonia” was Wright’s pet term for an America that might be perfected by his grandiose but populist vision. The idea behind these small houses was to offer beauty, practicality and affordability to families of average means. In practice, “affordability” never quite meshed into the equation, but Wright remains conspicuously alone among A-list architects who tried to improve the state of middle-
class single-family homes.
The Usonians weren’t stock plans. Wright designed each one to be unique, right down to the furnishings and light fixtures. They were rectangular or L-shaped in plan, generally constructed of concrete block and redwood, with lavish window areas and lovely but fussy detailing that kicked up the cost. Living rooms were large and bedrooms minuscule, but built-in plywood furniture made excellent use of space. Wright also invented the carport for the Usonian house, and it spread to the suburban “ranch” houses of the ’50s.
The Brandes house occupies 3 wooded acres on the Sammamish Plateau. It’s very compact by modern standards – 1,600 square feet plus a 300-square-foot guesthouse – but it feels astoundingly spacious when you walk in and settle down in the living room. A wall of windows on one side, French doors on the other, and clerestory windows surrounding a ceiling recess flood the room with daylight and connect it to the outdoors.
The house exudes quiet dignity, and yet it’s bristling with quirks. The kitchen features a custom-fabricated stainless steel countertop with five electric burners, a forerunner of modern cooktops. The two children’s bedrooms open onto a micro-hall barely 18 inches wide. The likely reason was to allow the children an intermediate degree of privacy without shutting their doors – Wright loved to experiment with familial social engineering in his house designs. The guesthouse enjoys a fireplace in a miniature den, which Cullen uses as an office, but oddly, there’s no plumbing.
Cullen spent his teen years in the house and later raised his own two children in it, and he thinks its refusal to encompass too much stuff is a positive quality.
“You just don’t let clutter accumulate,” he says. “The kids recycled their toys instead of letting them pile up.”
The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a non-profit that fights to preserve the architect’s work, holds a preservation easement, which means that future owners will have to get conservancy approval for alterations.
“Generally, people who are interested in buying a Frank Lloyd Wright house don’t want to make radical alterations,” says Ron Scherubel, the conservancy’s executive director. “They like the design and appreciate its historic significance.”
