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What It’s Like to Live in a Frank Lloyd Wright House

By Will Nesbitt

Real Estate Agent with Nesbitt Realty at Condo Alexandria 0225-089134

June 06, 2017 01:16 PM

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Houzz at a Glance
Who lived here: Sherman and Elizabeth Booth were the original owners. Sonia and Ted Bloch restored and maintained the house from 1967 until recently. Ted passed away, and the house is on the market for $1.7 million.
Location: Glencoe, Illinois
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Year completed: Stable and caretakers cottage, 1912; house as it stands today, 1916
That’s interesting: Eventually, Wright designed an entire neighborhood on the property, including his first completed bridge. The only other Wright-designed bridge ever built is part of the driveway at Fallingwater.

The height and massing of the home and its roof deck are uncommon for a Wright Prairie-style home, which usually emphasizes the horizontal over the vertical.

Early in his career, Wright designed a number of Prairie-style houses in Glencoe, which has the third-largest collection of Wright-designed structures in the world. Much of the credit for this is due to his lawyer, Sherman Booth, and his wife, Elizabeth.

In 1911, Sherman, who was also a conservationist and founding commissioner of the Glencoe Park District, and Elizabeth, a prominent suffragette instrumental in Illinois granting women the right to vote for president of the United States, tasked the architect with designing the estate. The idea was that the 15 acres surrounding the structures could serve as a nature preserve.

Wright created plans for a large estate house and other structures in 1911, while his friend, iconic landscape architect Jens Jensen, worked on the landscape plans. The stable-garage and a caretakers cottage were completed in 1912. A summer cottage that would serve as housing for the family during construction of the large house was completed in 1913. It has since been moved to another site in town.

A Change in Plans

That large house is another story in itself. Alas, it was never built. In Wright’s office’s renderings, you can see that the site planning is almost as dramatic as Fallingwater’s and that there are architectural moves echoing Taliesin.

Financial setbacks for the Booths caused them to scale back on their dreams for the property. In 1915, they had the land subdivided into a neighborhood, Ravine Bluffs. Wright designed additional houses for the neighborhood that were much more modest than the Booths’ home, as well as sculptural street markers, a train station and a bridge that crosses the neighborhood’s namesake ravine. Five of these homes were built. Meanwhile, Jensen designed the landscape for the subdivision.

The Booths’ belt-tightening resulted in new plans for the house as well. They scrapped the design for the large home that emphasized long horizontal lines perched right up next to and over the ravine. Instead, Wright created a home that related to the ravine via the vertical. He connected the existing caretakers cottage and the stable-garage with a tall central core in the middle to serve as their home. The main core is three stories, and the porch that leads out to the roof deck is the fourth story. The roof deck’s purpose: to look out over the trees to the ravine.

Ready for Its Next Custodians

Since its completion more than a century ago, the home has had only three owners: the Booth family, Northwestern University, and Sonia and Ted Bloch, who bought it in 1967. According to Sonia, the house had been intended for use as a conference center for Northwestern, but the university wound up putting it on the market. “It was completely vacant when we saw it. It had ragged carpets, and none of the light fixtures worked,” she says. “To some people, it was ugly, but to me, it was gorgeous.” The Blochs got to work restoring the house to its original glory.

The house has a theme of rectangular forms, which are repeated on the windows, in the millwork and on the light fixtures Wright designed especially for the home.

A Restoration Odyssey

“We were very fortunate that my husband was in the lumber business at the time,” Sonia says. “He was able to track down hard-to-find wood species to match the rest of the house where we needed it.” One example is this front hallway flooring; Ted searched until he found the same species of oak in narrow pieces at an obscure lumber supplier in Michigan. “We were fortunate to have contacts to really do it right,” she says.

Making the home livable again was a labor of love. During the restoration, the Blochs honored Wright’s original design down to every last detail, including the lantern-like light fixtures throughout the house. Even though the restored fixtures don’t leave much room for artwork on the walls and were difficult to bring back to life, they are among Sonia’s favorite things about the house. “These lanterns are very elegant and give off the most beautiful light,” she says.

The Blochs worked with interior designer Laurel Feldman to choose pieces that complemented the home and its unique, custom-designed details, such as the millwork, radiator covers, furniture, light fixtures and windows. An earthy neutral color palette and organic pieces like the couple’s pottery collection complement the views of the property.

This library area is a wonderful space that gives us a closer look at the intricate millwork.

Here is a first-floor plan so that you can keep track of how the rooms flow together as we go through the house. (Click or tap the image for a larger view.)

There is a natural flow through the spaces; the library area is open to this great room (marked “living room” on the plan), which also looks out toward the porch and the property beyond.

Though the Booths wound up subdividing the bulk of their 15 acres, their home’s site remained private, surrounded by trees. Wright designed floor-to-ceiling windows to provide views out to the garden and woods.

The porch is 15 by 20 feet and almost all windows. “The floor-to-ceiling windows on the porch were not something you’d see often in 1915, and they are amazing,” Sonia says.

Eaves around the exterior control the natural light. “The eaves keep out the bright winter light. The house always has lovely soft light, and we never needed drapes except in the bedrooms,” she says. “We were completely surrounded by greenery, and the light was the most beautiful at the end of the day.”

Here is a closer look at the eaves and the lines of windows from the outside.

Sonia has lovingly tended the gardens for 50 years. In fact, even though she’s out of the house and it’s on the market, she still meets the gardener on Thursdays to get her hands in the dirt and work on the yard.

Digging Into the Past

Sonia also learned more about the design from one of Sherman and Elizabeth Booth’s sons. At one point, she found out that Sherman Booth Jr. was living close to where she was staying in Florida, so she looked him up and paid him a visit. “Sherman Jr. told me that his mother didn’t want people to see her kitchen when it wasn’t looking absolutely perfect,” she says. “He told me that is why she had Wright place the windows so high, to block the view to inside.”

Feldman was able to rework the kitchen in a way that suited the Blochs while keeping the spirit of the original room alive.

This rear patio is walled in on two sides by the home, and on the other side by the soft needles and leaves of the trees.

This office space gives us a good look at the details on the windows, which are framed in red gum, a wood that was readily available in the region when the house was built. Don’t miss the doorknob on the left side of the photo; every element of the house was carefully considered.

“Style-wise scholars talk about the height of the house and this roof deck with the fireplace because it was so unusual for Wright,” Sonia says. “Wright’s intention was for the roof deck to be a sculpture garden where you could look out over the ravine, but we just used it as a deck.”

Sonia says Sherman Jr. told her that when his father thought his sons needed to be toughened up, he had them sleep on cots on the roof deck porch when it was cold outside. It sounds as though the senior Booth was a proponent of the fresh-air movement that was going strong back then.

This spring, about 90 people toured the home, courtesy of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. Here they are listening to Sonia give a talk.

“People from all over the country flew in to see the house, and several people in attendance also lived in Wright homes,” says Pamela Linn, the daughter of architect and Wright aficionado John Tilton, who raised her in the Wright-designed J. Kibben Ingalls House. “It was a special day for all to get in to see this beautiful home.”

The master bedroom shows us two more Wright-designed lantern fixtures and windows that wrap a corner of the house. The careful attention Wright paid to corners is something Sonia learned from this house that has always stuck with her. “When I go out into the world and see all of the unattractive corners and spaces, it makes me think about how perfect everything here is,” she says.

Because of its verticality, the Booth home is not as suited to aging in place as one-story Prairie-style homes are, so Sonia has put it on the market, giving the next owners a chance to live in a Wright work of art. Let’s hope they will appreciate, love and maintain the home as beautifully as she and Ted did for all those years.

Visitor info. The Glencoe Historical Society has great photos of the area’s Wright houses, street markers and bridge, as well as a map of a good house walk.

More: Learn about other Frank Lloyd Wright homes

See more in Crystal City