Inside One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Final-Ever Designs | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

One of my favorite quotes from Frank Lloyd Wright is this, nature is the only body of God we see. What he's saying is that nature has this sacred quality. It's something that we need to take care of, that we need to treat with respect and dignity. And because we're a part of nature, we also need to treat each other with respect and dignity. This connection that Wright is trying to build into his buildings with nature, in fact, make our lives better. Toronto was commissioned by John Rayward in 1955, and it's among the last of the houses that Frank Lloyd Wright built since he died in 1959. While Toronto was being built, Wright was in New York City working on his largest commission, the Guggenheim Museum. During that time, Wright fled his suite in the Plaza Hotel and came up here to Connecticut because he enjoyed this house's connection with nature. This is one of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright designs, but I've only ever seen it in photographs and in the drawings that Frank Lloyd Wright and his apprentices created. When I walked into the space, it really made my heart race a little bit because it's this beautiful intersection of this sweeping curve of the solar hemicycle and this rectilinear design. I don't think I've seen that in any other Frank Lloyd Wright property in the same way. And it's this beautiful expression of material in one of the most breathtaking settings of all of Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings. The setting rivals even perhaps Wright's most famous work, Falling Water, in the way that the house engages nature. The curve in this house is what Wright called a solar hemicycle. What that means is that the curve follows the movement of the sun through the day. So the curve out here faces east. That means it's gathering the morning light. And as the sun moves through the sky, the light in the room continuously spreads and expands, illuminating the space not only with that natural light, but with the warmth of the sun. It's even an early form of sustainable design because the sun is being used to heat the space, especially in winter. Wright loved materials, the integrity of materials, the intrinsic character of materials, and bringing that out was something that was a central part of his organic architecture. Even humble material like this concrete block, Wright left it exposed not only to show what the house was built from, but also to show how the concrete itself was made. But he does something unusual with it. The horizontal joints between concrete block units are deeply raked. You see that horizontality expressed because that horizontality is the relationship with the earth itself. The vertical joints are raised a little bit so that they're flush with the concrete masonry unit. Those two things together underscore this horizontality and the relationship of building, people, and the land itself. He juxtaposes this material with this really warm, wonderful Philippine mahogany. And when you put these two things together, sort of the coolness of the block and the warmth of the wood, and once again, we get a bit of an emotional experience just by the juxtaposition of materials themselves. And if you imagine a walk through the woods, you don't just see one thing. You see different kinds of trees, shrubs, and bushes, and other plants. Nature does not like a monoculture. That actually doesn't really work very well. Wright is replicating that experience on interiors by creating these juxtapositions of material. We also see here in the corner, in a more rectilinear part of what's otherwise a curved design, we see this space that is a bit cave-like. Wright would call this a compression space, space with a lower ceiling, a little bit more darkness. The material that starts inside the house extends outside. There's this continuity of material broken only by this thin pane of glass that draws your eye outward, and inside and outside start to become a bit blurred. One of the things that Frank Lloyd Wright did was to design all of his buildings on a grid system. He would establish a grid to create a scale, similar to a musical staff, really, a scale for every part of the design. In this case, we can see that grid very clearly expressed on the floor, but that grid is also replicated in the panels in the ceiling, and even in the size of these upper clear story windows on the curved surface of the building. By creating that framework, he once again creates this unified method or this unified system for ensuring that every aspect of the property would be structured according to the grid. The floor is a characteristic color for Frank Lloyd Wright's design, beautiful subdued shade of red. Wright used many reds throughout his career, many different shades, but he loved it because it was a color not only found in nature, but it's a color that really defined us. Of course, it's the color of our blood, so it gives us life. This is the primary suite. Today, it's used as an office. It's a small space, and there's a reason for that. Wright wanted to connect people with other people, even within a family, and so he creates these designs to push you outwards. The concrete block of the wall lines up in an exterior planter, so that there's nature within the walls of the building even though it's outside, and you also encounter the pool. You'd start your day with this connection with water, and that's important in this house because the name Tarana was selected by Wright to signify the relationship of this house to the Noraton River right outside the window here, and that swimming pool really floats out over a pond that he's created by damming that river, and then you have the river itself, so there's always this connection with running water. Tarana being an aboriginal word for running water. You have this beautiful mitered glass window. The post that you would normally expect to find in the corner is gone. Instead, it's a glass upon glass conjunction there, which allows you this uninterrupted view of nature. Wright can do this because of the structural techniques that he uses where he doesn't need a post in the corner of the house to hold up the roof here. Instead, he's using cantilevers, a technique that he's really well known for to support the roof and other parts of the structure. One of the things that you see throughout this house is Frank Lloyd Wright's use of built-ins, whether it's shelving, cabinetry, even furniture. This is a very common element of Frank Lloyd Wright's properties. He loves the shelves for a couple of different reasons. First off, he could control where art's being placed, so it doesn't start disrupting the view of nature, but it also is something that Wright uses to create a sense of continuity. You'll notice how narrow this hallway is. There's a reason for that. We don't spend time in hallways, and Wright doesn't want you to spend time in this hallway. As you emerge from the bedrooms that line this space, he really wants you to move out but head directly to that living space, that big open floor plan that's connected with that primary view that's setting above the river and into the forest. The other bedrooms of the house are also small, but they don't have the same visual connection to nature, though there's still a beautiful view of trees. They're small and dark, as we said. Wright's trying to move you out of this personal space where you're coming to sleep and into that primary open floor plan. We not only have more built-ins, but we have beautiful, simple chairs. I particularly love these chairs because I think they're a little bit up on their toes. It's a nice design. The scale is small, and when this house was built, we tended to sit a little bit more toward the earth than we do today, and by seating us a little bit lower, the low ceilings that we have in these don't seem quite so low. The space opens up as we sit down. This is now one of the many bedrooms that exist in Tirana. Because that primary bedroom that Wright had designed for the Raybirds was quite small, they came back to him a few years after the house was initially built and asked him to design a more expansive primary suite for them. A much larger bedroom, still having a connection with the natural world, but also a huge primary bathroom suite, and here in the bedroom, a circular dressing area and closet. There's even an observatory above this bedroom suite, so that at night, Mr. Raybird could go up and through a telescope gaze at the stars. The addition that was made to the house a few years after it was initially built, by Wright himself, created this wonderful interior courtyard, allowing you to look at what had been the primary facade of the house, but still also embracing its connection with nature. The trees, this beautiful wood underneath the pergola, and even the soffit detail that breaks up the board, so that it's a bit more like the leaves found in nature off of a tree. That broken line is something that Wright uses always to try to connect us more with the natural landscape, since the solid line is not something that we necessarily find in nature. And instead of downspouts, Wright hated downspouts. He has these little stubs and chains hanging down, so that as it rained, we would actually hear the water flowing, settling into the ground, or even the small little pool right here. Wright wants to create this multi-sensory experience. It's not always visual in his architecture. Wright has us descend this beautiful floating staircase, and now we're back to the earth, back on the ground, while the building, because of Wright's cantilever techniques, seems to hover above the earth. That means we're really immersed in nature. We're totally connected to the land at this point, even though we know there's the structure above us. Because the house had such a beautiful setting, Wright designed it in a way that would take advantage of the natural landscape. He left the natural stones in situ, just where the river had placed them hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago, and he gives the house this great sense of repose. The gray of the concrete withdrawing, the warmth of the wood emerging, so that the building seems to have always belonged in this setting. He dams this gently flowing river to create a pond, and now we get to see the house in reflection as well. This is a technique that we often see in the Japanese gardens that inspired Wright, and indeed the Raywords hired an expert in Japanese garden design to create the landscape for them. He believed that a building should grace the landscape, that the building should feel as if it emerged naturally from the ground, and I really think it does that here. When I first encountered Wright's work as an eight-year-old boy, it was the space and the light that got me all excited because I'd never seen anything like it. Today, the space and the light still excites me because I now understand why that gives us the feeling that it does, why we feel different in a Frank Wright house, and that's because he uses space and light to create this sense of intimacy with the world around us. It concerns me that there's so much bland architecture, it's just functional, when what we could do and what we should do is take that inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright to give their clients a gracious way to live as part of the world around them, connected with everybody and everything that will make their lives better.