A Tour of the Ultimate Dwelling Designed By Frank Lloyd Wright: The Round Solar Home

Some remem­ber the 9­teen-nineties in Amer­i­ca because the sec­ond com­ing of the 9­teen-fifties. What­ev­er holes one can poke in that his­tor­i­cal fram­ing, it does really feel unusual­ly plau­si­ble inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cir­cu­lar Solar Home. Although not actu­al­ly constructed till 1967, it was com­mis­sioned from Wright by ship­ping magazine­nate Nor­man Lykes in 1959, the final yr of the archi­tec­t’s life. Nearly dat­ed although it might have seemed by the point of its com­ple­tion, tremendous­vised by Wright’s appren­tice John Rat­ten­bury, it will have accrued some retro cachet over the sub­se­quent many years. Then, within the ren­o­va­tion-mad nineties, the home­’s personal­ers introduced Rat­ten­bury again out to do a thor­ough replace and remod­el.

The result’s a sort of hybrid fifties-nineties aes­thet­ic, which is able to swimsuit some tastes guess­ter than oth­ers. However then, so do all of the res­i­dences designed by Wright, of which the Cir­cu­lar Solar Home in Phoenix, Ari­zona, is the final.

In the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, submit­ed when the home went on the mar­ket in 2021, actual property agent Dean­na Peters factors out a number of of its Wright­ian fea­tures: its cir­cu­lar kind, but in addition its curved corridor­methods, its cus­tom-built cab­i­netry (Philip­pine mahogany, in fact), its sig­na­ture “com­pres­sion-and-release” and “inside-out” spa­tial results, its can­tilevered bal­cony, its inte­gra­tion with the desert envi­ron­ment, and even its automobile­port — Wright’s personal coinage, and certainly his personal inven­tion.

Additionally within the man­ner of most Wright-designed houses — as he him­self was identified to acknowl­edge, and never with­out a boast­ful observe — the Cir­cu­lar Solar Home appears eas­i­er to have a look at than to dwell in, not to mention principal­tain. “The three‑bed room dwelling final bought in 2019, earlier than it had a quick peri­od on Airbnb (lease­ed for approx­i­mate­ly $1,395 an evening),” wrote Properties & Gar­dens’ Megan Slack in 2023. At the moment, it was on the mar­ket for $8.5 mil­lion, about half a mil­lion dol­lars greater than its personal­er need­ed in 2021. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, although it stays unsold as of this writ­ing, its ask­ing worth has risen to $8,950,000. Wright’s identify brings a cer­tain pre­mi­um, in fact, however so do the developments of the second: one hears, in spite of everything, that the nineties are again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

130+ Pho­tographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mas­ter­piece Falling­wa­ter

Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis Home, the Man­sion That Has Appeared in Blade Run­ner, Twin Peaks & Depend­much less Hol­ly­wooden Movies

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One in all Frank Lloyd Wright’s Comment­ready, Ultimate Cre­ations

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Dwelling & Stu­dio

Contained in the Beau­ti­ful Dwelling Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Inform Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.