The first time Eric and Eleanor Larrabee saw the dining room set Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for their Buffalo, N.Y., home, it was up for auction at Christie`s. It sold for $594,000 in a joint sale to the Struve Gallery, 309 W. Superior St., and the Hirschl and Adler Gallery in New York.
The Larrabees, owners of Wright`s George Barton house, had had no intention of bidding on ”their” dining room set that Christie`s estimated would fetch at least $200,000. But ”we were astonished” by the actual price, says Larrabee, an architect who is dean of art and design at the Pratt Institute in New York. So was Christie`s. Deborah Struve, owner of the Struve Gallery, says she considered the price a bargain, however. The oak table and eight slatted chairs, placed on the market by Barton family heirs and now on sale for $1.2 million at the Struve Gallery, temporarily set a new price record for 20th Century furniture.
Soon after, the meteoric Wright furniture market eclipsed its own record when Domino`s Pizza baron and Wright collector Thomas Monaghan just paid $1.6 million for another dining set. The set survives as the only remaining memorial to the architect`s Joseph W. Husser house in Chicago that was demolished in 1923.
The continued quantum leaps in prices of Wright`s furnishings and decorations, born again as investment art, just adds fuel to a heated controversy between preservationists and the art market over keeping Wright`s interiors intact.
Often caught in the middle are homeowners with furnishings too valuable to use, too expensive to insure and too vulnerable to risk storing in hot attics or damp basements. Certainly, furnishings and decorative arts by other architects such as Louis Sullivan also are caught in this debate, but Wright`s work is in a class all its own.
The demand for the Wright look keeps collectors vying for his originals while consumers buy reproductions of his designs in furnishings from Atelier International, sterling silver from Tiffany`s and fabrics from F. Schumacher and Co.
Larrabee notes with irony that his home was considered a neighborhood nuisance when he bought it 20 years ago. As for Wright furnishings, they used to be considered ”white elephants designed by that nutty architect,” says John Eifler, a restoration architect in Chicago who is just completing work on Wright`s Ward Willetts house in Highland Park.
Ironically, the preservationists who battled to save Wright`s homes from demolition did such a thorough job of educating the public about Wright`s genius that they exalted his work to near-icon status-and prices have risen to match. Restorationists are in a sense victims of this past success as they struggle now to keep decorative arts and furnishings in place and to buy back previously removed pieces for original settings where possible.
Their position is simple: ”When people buy a Frank Lloyd Wright window, then the house it was meant for doesn`t have it,” Eifler says. He blames the current price wars on the aggressive competition for interior arts among buyers.
Christie`s vice president Nancy McClelland calls this a ”blind argument because the preservationists haven`t offered any alternative. Most sellers can`t wait two or three years until the preservationists find a buyer” for a piece the auction house can sell immediately.
Leslie Hindman, of Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago, says she agrees that houses and furnishings should stay together because Wright designed them as a ”total work of art.” But Hindman notes, ”If Wright furniture is going to be sold on the market, we feel we should participate in the sale. We would be really silly to turn down consignments of that kind.”
Her firm included Wright furnishings for the first time in its October auction, an ironic first for Chicago as well, considering Wright`s Midwestern roots.
The surprise sale at the Hindman auction involved a small Wright bedside table that brought $20,000. Hindman says she thought it would sell for no more than $5,000 because ”it`s from 1937. It`s a late piece.”
Chicago commodities broker Milton Robinson, owner of the Willetts house, bought two Wright chairs for $70,000 each at the auction. Robinson says he has been trying unsuccessfully for four years to recover his home`s original Wright furnishings that included chairs sold at a garage sale nearly 30 years ago for $2 each. Monaghan made the most recent repurchase of one of those chairs, paying $198,000 for it.
The chairs Robinson bought don`t belong to his house. But with prices rising so fast, he says he thinks he stands a better chance of ”trading for something from my house” with other Wright furnishings rather than with cash. MARKET PRESSURES
By the early 1980s, when Christie`s became the first major auction house to offer decorative arts designed by prominent architects, a high-priced market already existed, McClelland says.
Highly publicized sales further stimulated the market, and it remains volatile. ”I`ve seen prices jump 10 times just because I was interested in buying,” Monaghan says.
”My assumption is that the prices can only go higher,” says New York gallery owner Max Protetch, who is selling a selection of Wright`s original drawings for Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, for $30,000 to $200,000 each. ”The logic of selling any rare commodity is that, with every sale, it becomes rarer.”
In many cases, furnishings left Wright`s prairie-style houses, built in the early 1900s, when original homeowners moved or died. Stained glass, fixtures and hardware came down as new homeowners modernized over the decades. ”I`ll walk in a museum and find pieces of my house,” says Susan Shipper-Smith, owner of the Avery Coonley Playhouse in Riverside that Wright designed as a private school in 1912. It was converted to a private residence when the school closed a few years later.
Shipper-Smith has located stained glass windows removed from the house in the 1950s in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Art Institute of Chicago. Monaghan owns most of them, part of a collection of more than 300 Wright pieces for which he has built a museum scheduled to open to the public next spring at the Domino`s Farms in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Replacing such windows, valued at tens of thousands of dollars each should they come up for sale, usually is out of the question for even the most restoration-minded Wright homeowners. As prices shoot to the stars, they along with many museums find themselves out of the bidding.
”I`ve tracked down furniture from houses I`m restoring and offered owners gobs of money for it. But I can`t beat Christie`s or Monaghan,” Eifler says.
Christie`s doesn`t buy the pieces it auctions but acts as an agent for the seller. Nor does it seek out pieces, McClelland says. ”Normally people come to us.”
Monaghan points out that the pieces he buys will be preserved forever and available for all the public to enjoy at his musuem. He refuses to buy anything being sold out of its original home, however. He, like the preservationists, says, ”It belongs there.” But other buyers view such pieces as fair game. And the temptation to owners to strip the homes down to their skeletons is increasing.
”If we took our house apart and sold it piece by piece, we`d realize a factor of many times the price of the house,” Larrabee points out.
They won`t do that out of a single motivation. ”We want to save it,”
Larrabee says, adding that he hopes the Barton home eventually will be purchased by a donor who would reunite it with its companion Darwin Martin house, owned by the University of New York at Buffalo and being restored as a museum.
A Wright home recently sold for more than $500,000 in Oak Park with remaining furnishings and fixtures included. Owner and buyer currently are negotiating a covenant to prevent sale of pieces separate from the house.
INFLATED VALUES
Living with a table or chair that has become an art object of staggering value creates its own problems, of course. ”If a chair is worth $200,000, maybe you don`t want kids climbing all over it,” Eifler says. And insurance costs inflate with the value of the piece.
Selling the original to a museum and having a replica made may be the best solution in such cases, says Wright`s grandson, California architect Eric Lloyd Wright. ”Interior furnishings were very important to my grandfather. He was insistent about designing furniture for houses” to create a unified environment. But the replica can maintain the character of the house, says Wright, who recently led a panel discussion on ”The Ethics of Ownership” at a conference at the Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio in Oak Park.
Robinson replicated the stained glass windows for his house, replacing those that were missing and donating originals that were left to the Chicago Historical Society because past restorations had left them too fragile to be soldered together again.
Wright himself commissioned artisans to craft furnishings and decorative arts from his drawings. The rub in replicas comes when homeowners don`t own the original and can`t find a drawing.
Wright left rights to all his drawings as well as his decorative arts and furniture designs to Taliesin, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation that summers at the studio complex he built in Spring Green, Wis., and spends the rest of the year at the complex in Scottsdale, Ariz. Owners restoring Wright homes can obtain sets of three copies of blueprints for their residences from Taliesin for fees that start at $350. The price includes copies of drawings of all furnishings and decorative arts designed for the home.
The foundation provides copies of drawings of furnishings and decorative pieces and permission to replicate them for private use for lower fees. (To obtain pricing information or a copy of a specific drawing, write to Bruce Brook Pfeiffer, director of archives, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Ariz. 85261.) REPRODUCTION LICENSING
”We want to improve the condition and quality of Frank Lloyd Wright homes. If a homeowner wants to replicate a piece, we cooperate. We have no quarrel with that,” says Elaine Freed, spokeswoman for the foundation. For commercial reproductions, however, Taliesin has established a licensing and royalties program.
The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park shares names from an expert`s list of craftsmen who specialize in restoring as well as duplicating everything from stained glass to wooden grilles for Wright homes as well as other period homes. Names can be obtained from the studio by calling 848-1976 and asking for the resource center.
Private collectors, art dealers and auction houses vary in their policies in making pieces available for measure, the only way a replica can be made when a drawing can`t be found.
Christie`s allows representatives of not-for-profit organizations or professionals restoring homes to take measurements on a selective basis and only with the permission of the owner, McClelland says. Monaghan allows Wright homeowners or architects restoring these homes to measure pieces, but they must agree to make only a single replica and to mark it as a reproduction, says Sara-Ann Briggs, director of the Domino`s Farms Archives and Galleries Corp. in Ann Arbor.
Existing reproductions provide another alternative to custom-made replicas. The Heritage-Henredon line that Wright authorized for consumer sale in the 1950s already has garnered a brisk resale trade.
The new reproductions on the market have been licensed by Taliesin. The companies involved in the licensing agreements pay royalties to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The furnishings marketed by Atelier and on view at their Merchandise Mart showroom range in price from $500 to $10,000.
Schumacher, using patterns from Wright`s stained glass windows and other interior designs, is offering a sumptuous line of fabrics, window sheers, carpets and even wallcoverings. Fabrics start at $30 a yard, sheers at $86 a panel, and wallcoverings at $26 a roll. Area rugs cost $54 a square foot. Schumacher also has a showroom at the Merchandise Mart. The Mart requires all puchases to be made through a designer, however.
Wright`s prairie-style buildings, with their dramatic symmetry to the prairie horizon, reflected his visionary sense of space as a melding of architecture and building materials with the natural environment and the human spirit. Like his early mentor Louis Sullivan, he viewed such architecture as
”organic” in the sense that it creates and reflects a holistic environment. Wright built Taliesin in Wisconsin and then Taliesin West as a utopian architect`s colony based on these philosophies.
Eric Lloyd Wright, who worked with his grandfather at Taliesin in Wisconsin, recalls a community where ”we did everything. We had a communal way of life. We did all the drafting, all the farming, all the cooking. We even had our own chorus.”
Wright`s earlier home and studio in Oak Park, now restored and open for public tours, carried the sense of a creative environment even so far as including a stage in the airy upstairs playroom to encourage his children in creative expression.
SUBSTITUTE STYLES
Wright and his contemporary followers often recommend mission furnishings for his homes, even though Wright ”didn`t really like mission,” says Donald Kalec, who served as staff architect at the Oak Park home and studio during the past several years of renovation. Wright thought mission furniture was rather heavy but preferred it to the Victorian designs so much in vogue at the time, Kalec notes.
People restoring Wright homes often seek out contemporary designs in furnishings rather than reproductions as a solution to recapturing the architect`s spirit of space.
The Larrabees have turned to wood furnishings with clean lines for their home. Eleanor Larrabee, also an architect, has designed some of the pieces herself.
Shipper-Smith hired designer and woodworker George Nakashima in New Hope, Pa., to create several slatted-back wood pieces with sculptural asymmetrical seats for fireside entertaining on the raised platform that used to be the stage at the Coonley Playhouse.
In the end, the contemporary interpretations, the reproductions, the restorations of his homes and the collections of his interior arts all mark the epic proportions of Wright`s legacy. A generation after his death, this most passionate of architects continues to inspire a spirit of passion that rivals as well as reflects the greatness of his work. –
