Being Frank Lloyd Wright’s son surely came with its downsides. But one of the upsides — assuming you could stay in the mercurial master’s good graces — was the possibility of his designing a house for you. Such was the fortune of his fourth child David Samuel Wright, a Phoenix building-products representative well into middle age himself when he got his own Wright house. It must have been worth the wait, given that he and his wife lived there until their deaths at age 102 and 104, respectively. Not long thereafter, the sold-off David and Gladys Wright House faced the prospect of imminent demolition, but it ultimately survived long enough to be added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.
Given that its current owners include restoration-minded former architectural apprentices Taliesin West, the David and Gladys Wright House would now seem to have a secure future. To get a sense of what makes it worth preserving, have a look at this new tour video from Architectural Digest led — like the AD video on Wright’s Tirranna previously featured here on Open Culture — by Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation president and CEO Stuart Graff. He first emphasizes the house’s most conspicuous feature, its spiral shape that brings to mind (and actually predated) Wright’s design for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Here, Graff explains, “the spiral really takes on a unique sense of longevity as it moves from one generation, father, to the next generation, son — and even today, as it moves between father and daughter working on this restoration.” That father and daughter are Bing and Amanda Hu, who have taken on the job of correcting the years and years of less-than-optimal maintenance inflicted on this house on which Wright, characteristically, spared little expense or attention to detail. Everything in it is custom made, from the Philippine mahogany ceilings to the doors and trash cans to the concrete blocks that make up the exterior walls.
“David Wright worked for the Besser Manufacturing Company, and they made concrete block molds,” says Graff. “David insisted that his company’s molds and concrete block be used for the construction and design of this house.” That wasn’t the only aspect on which the younger Wright had input; at one point, he even dared to ask, “Dad, can the house be only 90 percent Frank Lloyd Wright, and ten percent David and Gladys Wright?” Wright’s response: “You’re making your poor old father tired.” Yet he did, ultimately, incorporate his son’s requests into the design — understanding, as Bing Hu also must, that filial piety is a two-way street.
Related content:
A Beautiful Visual Tour of Tirranna, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remarkable, Final Creations
130+ Photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece Fallingwater
What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusual Windows Tell Us About His Architectural Genius
A Virtual Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japanese Masterpiece, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo
When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Doghouse, His Smallest Architectural Creation (1956)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
