While the pipe dream of any architecture aficionado may be to own a genuine Frank Lloyd Wright house, the belt-tightening reality is that something smaller, such as a furniture, textile, or glass item, might be a bit of design history more within reach of tighter pocketbooks. Read on to learn more about Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy in small interior furnishings.
Frank Lloyd Wright: Early Life
Even architectural amateurs recognize the name Frank Lloyd Wright, thanks to his well-preserved homes and public works around the world, but especially in the United States. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was born in Wisconsin to a barely-employed father and teacher mother, as one of three children with two younger sisters. Both parents had artistic sides, and his mother famously predicted that her only son would one day grow to design beautiful buildings. She decorated his bedroom walls with engravings of English cathedrals and gave him a Froebel Gifts wooden block set to play with, likely wiring his brain early to see how to design.
However, Wright’s childhood was tumultuous; his parents divorced when he was 14, and he never graduated high school. Nevertheless, he persisted and enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a “special student” to study civil engineering.
Prairie Style & Taliesin
Wright’s undergraduate academic studies laid the foundation for the beginning of his architectural career in Chicago, where he rapidly rose in the ranks of the field and finessed his way into a job with the firm Adler & Sullivan while also designing bootleg houses in his own time. Naturally, this first job led to him eventually starting his own firm, which led to a boom in classic Prairie Style houses (1900-1914) and much later Usonian Houses (c. 1930s).
Wright managed quite an interesting personal life with a smattering of marriages, affairs, divorces, and horrific tragedies at one of his signature projects, Taliesin. Wright started building Taliesin in 1911 on a plot of land in Spring Green, Wisconsin, that his mother bought for him and a refuge for his mistress and her children. On August 15, 1914, while Wright was working in Chicago, one of his staff members set fire to Taliesin and murdered seven people inside with an axe as the fire burned.
Wright’s fascinating personal history includes love affairs and continued work in architecture worldwide until his death in 1959.
More than Buildings
Today, Wright is most well known for buildings such as Pennsylvania’s Fallingwater. However, Wright fans looking for a piece of the architectural legend are better off seeking smaller-sized collectibles rather than multi-million dollar homes.
Since Wright’s style overflowed from the building exterior and interiors into the furnishings themselves, many Wright furnishings, glassware, ceramics, and textiles are readily available on the secondary market.
FLW: Glass and Textiles
In terms of glass and textiles, you don’t have to look far to find panels of Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass and even curtains for sale. In 2015, this single stained glass window from the Arthur B. Heurtley House in Oak Park, Illinois, sold for $14,000, and a window from his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo sold for nearly a third of that at $4375 in 2020. Other Frank Lloyd Wright glass items to seek out include Prairie-style lamps, lampshades, sconces, and even mirrors.
Like glass, Wright-designed textiles were used in important buildings to integrate the aesthetic. Today, vintage fabric and curtain panels from hotels around the world are up for auction. These Arizona Biltmore Hotel curtains sold for just $500, a bargain compared to an actual house nest pas?
As you search for these vintage textiles, be sure to use not just “Frank Lloyd Wright” in your online searches but also “Taliesin,” as companies such as Schumacher attached that brand to their textile and wall covering offerings.
FLW: Furniture
If you have more in the coffer to assign to a Frank Lloyd Wright memento, a fine furniture example is your best bet. Even though many Wright houses are now run as museums or historic sites, plenty of private homes and some of their interior furnishings have come on and off the market. As a result, it is not uncommon to find a smattering of, say, chairs from the same home hitting the auction block simultaneously.
In 2022, several auction houses, including Freeman’s, offered similar Wright chairs for sale, all realizing prices under 15K. In all, chairs are certainly the most common Wright furniture available for sale, although you can usually locate a dining room table or two. For folks with smaller living spaces and apartments to furnish, small shelving units, side tables, and accent furniture pieces are few and far between. Don’t be surprised to see some of those sell for prices as high as dining room tables since they are often more desirable for smaller living spaces in cities and such.
Even if Frank Lloyd Wright fans can’t purchase an actual building, a small side table is within reach for some!
Amy Moyer is the proprietor of Antmuffin: Art, Antiques & Collectibles. She holds a B.A. in Visual Art from Brown University and lives in Boston.
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