The Wright Way

"I told him it was like buying a run-down farm and opening the barn doors and finding a Duesenberg in the garage," Adams says, likening the Marden house to a coveted antique car. "You have a choice: You can either turn it into a hot rod, sell it for parts, or you could bring it back to its original beauty."

To Kimsey, whatever beauty was there was hard to see. Over the years the house had been neglected as Marden and his wife had aged. The roof and large concrete planters below the house were overgrown with weeds. Inside, most of the Mardens' furnishings had been removed, but piles of books remained. Cushions in the Wright-designed built-in seats along the dining room walls were moldy and full of mice. It looked, Adams says, "like a storage shed."

That run-down house was the first thing Kimsey would see in the morning when he looked out the window of his luxe master bath.

"He was first, like, 'Knock it down,'" recalls Kimsey's house manager, Hayley Winfield. "He didn't know what he had."

Some local Wright devotees had feared that a buyer would grab the property just for its prized location and put up a mega-mansion, says Peter Christensen, a docent at the Pope-Leighey House -- the restored Wright home in Fairfax County that is now a museum. And just up Chain Bridge Road, Joan Smith -- a former Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation board member and the wife of the executor of the Mardens' estate -- wondered what designs a tech mogul like Kimsey had on the house. "Obviously he was building this grand complex for entertaining," Smith says. "I thought, 'How can a man like that understand this little house?' It's small. It's simple. It's made of concrete. I didn't know. I was going to have to find out."

When Frank Lloyd Wright and Luis Marden began corresponding in 1940, the architect met a kindred spirit and an equally monumental ego. Marden had seen a "dream house" in Life magazine that Wright had designed for the typical American family in 1938. It was just the kind of low-cost, well-designed dwelling Wright dreamed of building for the new suburban homeowner. He ultimately built dozens of these low-slung but elegant structures around the country, which he dubbed "Usonian" homes.

While Wright was the flamboyant genius whose style of organic architecture broke new ground, Marden was a self-taught man who managed to parlay an interest in early color photography into a decades-long career at National Geographic, picking up five languages along the way and writing more than 55 articles for the august journal.

Marden's exploits were legendary at the magazine: He discovered the ruins of the HMS Bounty near Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific in 1956, and later met with Marlon Brando to counsel him on his role in the movie version of the tale. He went on dives with Jacques Cousteau. Long after he had officially retired, he and wife Ethel, then in their seventies, set sail from the Canary Islands to retrace Columbus's journey to the New World, arguing that the explorer had actually landed much farther south than historians initially believed.

"[H]e is a celebrity to an eclectic circle of admirers on all continents," journalist Cathy Newman wrote in a National Geographic article titled "The Art of Being Luis Marden" in 2000. "Long ago, staffers at the magazine stopped being surprised when asked by a Mideast monarch or a mule driver in Mexico: 'Tell me, how is Luis Marden these days?' The late Joseph Judge, an editor, claimed a hermit in Alaska turned him down for an interview. He was 'saving my story for Luis Marden.'"

Ethel, now 94 and living in an assisted care facility in Arlington, was a thrilling person in her own right, recalls Luis's niece, Danielle de Benedictis, 59, a Massachusetts attorney. The couple had met at a Washington boardinghouse in 1934 and were married in 1939.

Trained as a mathematician, Ethel Mar-den had a long career at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, working on prototypes of the earliest computer, de Benedictis says. She was also a licensed pilot and an expert scuba diver, and she adored fast cars.

Ethel recalled in a 2001 interview for the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives that she and Luis had been fishing for hickory shad in the Potomac one day in 1944 near Chain Bridge when they found the site for their future home. "We were fishing down below when my husband looked upstream and saw the cliff and he said, 'I wouldn't mind living up there,'" she said. "So we got in touch with real estate people on Monday morning and found there was land available here on the river. So we bought it."