The Wright Way

Luis had already written to Wright four years earlier, asking him for plans for a house similar to the one that was featured in Life. "My dear Mr. Marden," Wright wrote back. "We do not have plans of buildings to send out inasmuch as our houses are planned for the individual needs, requirements, incomes as well as locations of our clients . . . However, I would be glad to design a house for you."

But Wright's busy schedule and the Mardens' peripatetic lifestyle delayed progress of the house until 1952. Then well into his eighties, Wright was immersed in the plans for New York's Guggenheim Museum and other projects. He didn't visit the Mardens' property, but worked instead from topographic maps, which wasn't unusual for him at that point in his career.

When the drawings for the house finally arrived from Wright's studio in 1952, however, they were something of a disappointment, Ethel Marden said in the 2001 interview. Similar to another home Wright was designing at the time in a prairie setting, the hemicycle house -- shaped like a football -- did not fit the sheer cliff it would stand on, the Mardens felt. He'd even drawn in a place for a lily pond.

"While normally I like an 'ornamental water' very much, I think you would agree if you could actually stand at the site of the proposed house, that it would not be a good idea to place the lily pond on the terrace," Luis wrote in a letter to Wright in 1953. "The contrast to the onlooker standing at the window looking out across a peaceful pool with its lily pads down to what is literally a roaring, foaming cataract . . . would be too violent."

Wright eventually dispatched one of his apprentices, Robert W. Beharka, to Washington to oversee construction of the Marden house, as well as one he had designed for his son, lawyer Robert Llewellyn Wright, in Bethesda. The third Wright house in the area is the Pope-Leighey House, which was built in Falls Church but since has been moved to the grounds of the Woodlawn Plantation in Fairfax County.

When Beharka arrived, the Mardens made clear to him that there was another major flaw in the plans, Beharka recalls. He is still a practicing architect in Los Banos, Calif. The Mardens thought the way Wright had designed the wide terrace blocked the view of the river below for those standing inside the house. So Beharka slunk back to Taliesin -- Wright's headquarters in Spring Green, Wis. -- to break the bad news. It was a cold night when he met Wright in the drafting room to tell him the terrace conundrum, he recalls.

"I told him exactly what they wanted -- a shallow terrace that would step down," Beharka says. Wright bent over the drawings and quietly resketched a narrower terrace. Then he got up to leave, and Beharka stopped to help Wright put on his coat. The great architect sighed and said, "Don't ever get into this business."

Wright finally made it to Washington to visit the half-finished house shortly before he died in April 1959. Upon arrival, he took in the cascading rapids, turned to Ethel and murmured, "I had no idea it was so dramatic."

He seemed pleased with the construction. He used his cane -- which for much of his life served as a "perfectly superfluous" prop, according to biographer Meryle Secrest -- to point out with pleasure how the grouting between the concrete blocks had been dug out to emphasize the horizontal lines and filled in on the vertical, a hallmark of a Wright house.

Beharka served as his driver for the trip, taking him to see the Mardens and then to Bethesda to view his son's home. On the way out of town, Beharka recalls driving him to National Airport when Wright caught a glimpse of the Washington Monument outside his window. Wright said, "I don't know why they made that so pointed."

As many owners of Wright homes have found over the years, living in a work of art was not always easy. Ethel Marden said that the concrete floors cracked and were uneven, and the furnace had been improperly installed. The house cost $76,000 to build by the time it was completed in 1959 -- far more than the price tag of more modest Usonian homes.

Still, she described how the couple loved sitting at the small breakfast table overlooking the water in the early mornings, watching the birds in their bird feeders. They also fed vanilla wafers to a steady stream of neighborhood raccoons. "Our beautiful house . . . stands proudly just under the brow of the hill, looking down always on the rushing water which constantly sings to it, day and night, winter and summer," Ethel wrote to Wright in 1959. "It will . . . represent for us, as you put it when you were here, 'a way of life.'"