Let There Be Light
Some fragmented thoughts on Frank Lloyd Wright's gorgeous Martin House, ephemeral wealth, huge ego, attention to detail, and brisket biryani
Friday, November 14
East Sandwich, Mass.
“It is out of love and understanding that any building is born to bless or curse those it is built to serve,” the architect Frank Lloyd Wright once wrote. “Bless them if they will see, understand, and aid. Curse them as it will be cursed by them if either they or the architect fail to understand each other.”
Over the past few weeks, Tristan and I have had the special opportunity to experience the blessing and the curse of Wright’s architecture—first, at Taliesin West, his winter home and studio in Scottsdale, Ariz., and then at the Martin House, in Buffalo, N.Y.
We both geek out about architecture. Tristan is more erudite about the field, while I see buildings more through the lenses of hospitality, theology, and whether I just feel good in the space. These weren’t our first exposures to Wright’s work. At home in Grand Rapids, we often pass by the Meyer May House, which we once explored inside. We’ve been to Fallingwater, in Pennsylvania; the Guggenheim Museum, in New York; and to the Robie House, in Chicago.
Both Taliesin West and the Martin House display, in quite different ways, Wright’s pioneering perspective and idiosyncratic manner. But it was the Martin House, with its luminous spaces and its gorgeous detail, Roman brick and glittering mortar, that wowed me. Plus, we got to stay in a Wright-designed house for the first time.
All of it made me want to know more about the stories mixed into that mortar.
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Frank Lloyd Wright was the son of a preacher and a teacher. His dad’s work as a Baptist circuit rider and musician made for a peripatetic, impoverished childhood. Born in Wisconsin, Frank had lived in Iowa, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island by the time he was 7.
When Frank was 10, the Wrights returned to Wisconsin. In his autobiography, he writes rapturously of Wisconsin’s countryside, where he found solace and sustenance: “Milkweed blossoming to scatter its snowy fleece on every breeze. Sorrel reddening on the hills, far and wide. The world of daylight gold would go through violet passing to the deep blue of the night.” Young Frank roamed all over that land, finding companionship with the lady-slippers—he knew, he said, “where those rare ones, white and purple, were hidden”—and the Jack-in-the-Pulpit, the wild strawberries and the watercress, which grew “in the cool streams flowing from hillside springs.”
Nature’s consolation became even more profound in his teens, when his father left the family. His ambitious mother had long before decided her eldest child would be an architect—it’s said that she posted images of great British cathedrals in his childhood bedroom. Frank’s love of the land, and in particular the Midwestern prairie, eventually came to define his style of architecture. “The horizontal planes in buildings, those planes parallel to earth, identify themselves with the ground—make the building belong to the ground,” he wrote. After moving to Chicago to apprentice in the studio of the great Louis Sullivan, he lamented the tendency he saw to build ever taller structures, with chimneys reaching upward, “sooty fingers threatening the sky.” “A little height on the prairie was enough to look like much more,” he argued, critiquing “a mean tendency to tip everything in the way of human habitation up edgewise instead of letting it lie comfortably and naturally flat with the ground.”
He hated almost everything about the homes then being built—the dormers, the basements, the array of rooms. Such houses, he said, “lied about everything,” meaning they ignored their Midwestern surroundings. He wanted layouts evoking the expansive outdoors. So Wright emphasized breadth and drew wide-open spaces, breaking the standard boxes of traditionally small rooms, which he described as “cellular sequestration that implied ancestors familiar with penal institutions.” More windows brought in more light, with fewer walls and doors to inhibit its passage. He pioneered a style of architecture that came to be called the Prairie School.
The Martin House was commissioned by the businessman Darwin D. Martin. After his mother died when he was 5, his father remarried and split up his five kids, taking Darwin, the youngest, and his brother Frank with him to his new home in Nebraska. Darwin hated it. When he was 12, he and Frank moved back east, where Darwin became a door-to-door soap salesman for the Larkin Company. His acumen for numbers drew the attention of company president John Larkin, who brought him to headquarters in Buffalo. By age 25, Martin had become a wealthy executive at the Larkin Company, which had grown into a mail-order empire selling not just soap but everything else a household might need, including furniture, cutlery, and clothes.
Martin originally commissioned Wright to build a new office building for the Larkin Company. But he also asked Wright to build him a home—really, a compound—for his family. “I never ceased mourning of a broken home,” Martin said. “The sweetest song on earth is home, sweet home.”
The first building, a house for Martin’s sister and her family, completed in 1904, was essentially proof of concept for the rest of the complex. The 15,000-square-foot main house was finished the following year. By 1907, there was also a carriage house, a pergola, and a conservatory, designed to house rare plants and a replica of Winged Victory. Two years later, a final building, a cottage for the resident gardener, was added. In total, the compound’s construction cost at least $175,000—about $6.5 million today.
Funnily enough for a kid who’d hated his time in Nebraska, the Martin House came to be recognized as a Prairie School masterpiece. Miles of rift-cut white oak embellish the Martin House, most notably on the trim that, unlike crown molding, sits about a foot below ceiling height, emphasizing horizontality and creating coziness. The rooms flow, one into the next—a precocious example of open-plan living.
Light flows through the house too. Fewer than 10% of American homes had electricity in the first decade of the 20th century; though the Martin house did, Wright amplified the still-dim light with subtle, ingenious touches like gilded mortar, infused with bronze. Still more sunlight, as well as views of the landscaped outdoors, came in through the numerous art-glass windows, some of which had as many as 750 individual pieces of glass. Darwin Martin’s wife, Isabelle, suffered from a degenerative eye condition that made it difficult to see clearly without sufficient light. So in the areas of the living space where Wright knew she would spend the most time, he drew in yet more sunshine through art-glass skylights.
We toured the Martin House on a gray Buffalo day. Still, every room glowed.
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As it stands now, the Martin House is the product of a decades-long labor of love and architectural resurrection orchestrated by the nonprofit Martin House Restoration Corporation, founded in 1992 to honor Wright’s legacy in Buffalo.
Much of Martin’s wealth evaporated in the stock-market collapse of 1929. He died in 1935. Two years later, his family abandoned the property. Eventually, the City of Buffalo seized it in lieu of unpaid taxes. The property was broken up and sold, and the carriage house and conservatory were demolished so that apartments could rise in their place. Over the past 30 years, the compound has been pieced back together, the main house restored, and the destroyed structures rebuilt to Wright’s original plans.
Throughout our visit, what struck me most was not the property’s beauty, though it was indeed beautiful. It was the deep and imperfect humanity inscribed into its design and embodied in its inhabitants’ stories: dramatic rises, stunning declines, extraordinary yet ephemeral wealth, the enduring and priceless inspiration of nature, such specific care but also such enormous ego.
Wright’s attentiveness to the house’s occupants extended beyond the Martin family. The kitchen, for instance, is no less luminous than the rest of the house, with a wall of windows that afforded the staff generous views of the gardens.
Yet in other areas, Wright seemed to betray his stated commitment to love and understanding—or, perhaps, to suggest that the client’s love and understanding should be self-sacrificial. For the main bedroom, he designed a bed whose foot aligned just so with the corners of the built-in cabinetry. The geometry might have been perfect, but the function was not; the bed was too short to sleep in comfortably. For two years, Martin asked Wright for a bed more suitable for sleeping. For two years, his architect ignored him. Finally, the Martins ripped out the bed Wright had designed. (Curses.)
Wright was famously controlling. He chose two dozen pieces of Japanese art, then sent his clients instructions on where each was to be hung, along with the bill. Though Martin adored books, Wright didn’t want them seen, so all the bookshelves are hidden, save for one rack that allowed volumes of the encyclopedia to be displayed—horizontally, to honor the lines of the house. Our docent also told us that, even after the project was complete, Wright retained keys. Occasionally, he’d visit and rearrange the furniture to his liking.
When I read a biography of Wright, I learned Wright had probably inherited his stubborn spirit from his mother’s Welsh-immigrant side. One of his forebears, a Baptist-turned-Unitarian minister named Jenkin Jones, was considered heretical enough that he was banned from the pulpit in his own church in Cardiganshire. Rather than repent, he went a few miles down the road, built a chapel of his own on family land, and kept on preaching.
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We stayed overnight in the Gardener’s Cottage. (The Martin House has a creative-residency program, and artists and writers are occasionally invited to visit.) It is the most modest of the structures on the 1.5-acre complex. But “cottage” is relative. At nearly 1,700 square feet, it’s bigger than our house.
Even in an outbuilding, Wright was set on breaking the standard box. Tall panels on the house’s corners mimic piers—I say “mimic,” because they’re not structural—to create dimension. Inside, niches in the corners of the living room serve the same purpose. In both the living room and the main bedroom, windows on three sides draw in light. And while those windows are nowhere near as elaborate as those in the main house, Wright still insisted on art glass with geometric designs inspired by nature.
Much of the cottage’s furniture, though not original, was Wright-designed. I sat in one of his “barrel” chairs for about ten seconds; it was ridiculously uncomfortable. But I happily tucked myself into the built-in nook in the kitchen—a perfect temporary workspace. And fortunately, the bed was not Wright’s; we slept well.
The next morning, I looked out the windows to see sullen skies and falling snow, the grayscale broken by the remaining autumn leaves. For the entire Martin House complex, Wright chose an autumnal color palette—amber and gold, terra cotta and muted green—complementing the wood, radiating warmth, and honoring nature.
“Bless them if they will see, understand, and aid,” Wright wrote. He was referring to a building’s occupants, but the same could be said of all of us who inhabit this good earth.
Docent-led tours of the Martin House complex are available Thursdays through Mondays. You can read more about the Martin House and book tickets at martinhouse.org.
What I’m Eating and Cooking: Southern Junction, chef Ryan Fernandez’s outstanding fusion-barbecue joint, is our favorite restaurant in Buffalo. I think it’s also the only place outside of Texas where we’ll regularly eat barbecue.
Fernandez, who was born in India and grew up in Texas, smokes an excellent brisket. It especially shines in his brisket biryani, a dish of serendipity. When he first started experimenting with smoking meat, “the first brisket I cooked was awful. So overcooked. Terrible,” he told me. “I was pretty broke, and I had to figure out a way to turn it into something. I was really getting into cooking family recipes, and I was making some biryani, so I thought, I can chop this meat up and see where it goes.”
Fernandez’s brisket biryani is so good that, on our last two visits, I bought an extra quart to take home. It reheats superbly. For lunch today, I made saag paneer to accompany, using Aarti Sequeira’s easy recipe. A perfect meal for a cold day.
Thanks, as always, for coming along on this ride. I’d love to know what you’re cooking on these late-autumn days to bring comfort and warmth.
Yours,
Jeff
p.s. Last month, I wrote about my own experience of the prairie. If you missed it, you can read that essay here:
What a beautiful and insightful piece. Almost forty years ago now, I had the chance to dine at Robie House as a young college admissions officer attending a conference hosted by the University of Chicago. I spent twenty years living in Iowa and my boy was born and raised there, so my interest in the prairie remains. (I've also spent years in New England's cramped spaces and Wright's comment about "ancestors familiar with penal institutions" made me laugh with recognition.) Mostly, I loved this bit of your prose: "the deep and imperfect humanity inscribed into its design and embodied in its inhabitants’ stories." Thank you.
I was entranced the first time I stepped into a Wright house. If I were rich, I would have something similar built for myself now.