Frank Lloyd Wright liked mahogany, and on a bright day it’s easy to see why. The wood shimmers and glows yellow-orange in the sun. Wright used lots of mahogany on the Galesburg house he custom-designed for Curtis and Lillian Meyer in 1948.
A few years ago though, the wood on the house’s outside would not have looked so nice.
“There was a previous owner who had done some non-Wright additions – not physical additions but ‘improvements’ in quotes,” says Doug LaBrecque, who bought the Meyer house in 2003.
Kalamazoo is celebrated for its handful of houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. They represent the architect’s Usonian style – a pared-down version of his grand Prairie Style architecture.
While at least one of Wright’s most famous houses has needed major repairs, local homeowners say their Wright houses are sound. But the work they do need can run toward the unusual.
At the Meyer House, the previous owner’s “non-Wright additions” included – to LaBrecque’s horror – brown paint on the exterior mahogany. It had to come off, but it didn’t go easily.
“It’s been a number of years just painstaking process to strip every bit, every single window, every bit of the fascia,” LaBrecque says. Fascia is the trim at the edge of the roof.
LaBrecque says as its core the Meyer House is not fussy. Many of the walls are built with concrete blocks – hard to mess up even if you try. But the woodwork takes a lot of, well, work – especially because many of this house’s walls curve.
Carpenter Lucas Korth-McDonnell has spent many hours on the Meyer house restoration. He says it’s the first time he’s worked on a curved house.
“It makes it just a little bit harder,” he says.
Concrete makes the house durable. But in some places it makes repairs difficult. Wright had pipes laid into the floor to radiate heat from below. LaBrecque says over the years, the pipes broke down in places.
“And so we tried desperately to find the leaks and repair the leaks, we jackhammered out three sections, and then we decided it was just sort of needle in haystack so I put in new radiant heating,” he says.
Not that every repair has been an ordeal. LaBrecque explains what the repair crew’s going to do with the doorknobs on the closets.
“They were really worn on this side, and they were like brand new on the inside, so he’s going to turn them all inside out,” he says.
In fixing up this house, LaBrecque has had to make up for years of relative neglect. Things have gone better for one of Wright’s houses on Taliesin Drive in the City of Kalamazoo.
Peter Copeland and his wife Janet own the house Wright designed for Eric and Ann Brown, completed in 1951. No curvy walls on this one – the Brown house has a big rectangular common area, with living quarters branching to the side.
“We were lucky. When we bought this house we were the third owners. The Browns lived here 50 years,” he says.
But one part that has needed work over the years is the roof. The first was made of cedar, which rotted after just a few winters. The stone pebble roof that replaced it lasted much longer, but after a few decades it needed work too.
Copeland says the problems came from some “rather exaggerated cantilevering,” an approach Wright was fond of, where a piece of a building sticks out like a diving board over a pool.
“For example looking out the window you see, there’s no support on that whole corner of the roof over the carport. And so over time that began to sag. So in 2010 the previous owners put on a whole new roof that was reinforced with steel,” he says.
One Wright design that did not last at the Brown House was a wooden-walled shower stall.
“Wright’s plan was that when you finished your shower you wiped it down. What a nuisance. So at some point along the way, I don’t know if it was Eric Brown or the previous owners, but they tiled it which makes more sense,” Copeland says.
But Copeland says he agrees with LaBrecque. Overall these houses are solid.
At Doug LaBrecque’s house in Galesburg, carpenter Lucas Korth-McDonnell takes a hand plane to a piece of mahogany.
“They’ve got this little bevel on the edge that was cut originally with the hand plane. So we’re cutting them all with the hand plane, trying to replicate the look of it,” he says.
You might say the house is on its way to looking all Wright.
