The Wright Way

The first time they met, she greeted him at the door with a firm handshake and showed off her underwater diving medals. Later, he and his friend Queen Noor, the widow of the king of Jordan, used to take Ethel to lunch at the Cosmos Club, where she was a member. Kimsey evidently found these meetings so elegant that he's moved to describe them in French: "Très gentil," he says.

As a condition of purchasing the house, he agreed to let Ethel live there as long as she was physically able and -- a highly unusual clause in the purchase contract -- that the couple's ashes could be spread under a beech tree on the property after both their deaths. Luis Marden died in 2003.

After Ethel moved into a retirement community in 2003, Kimsey ruminated for months about what to do about the house. It was the first thing he saw every morning as he was shaving. "Its presence just spoke to me," he says. "It sat there every morning crying out, 'Don't let me sit here and degrade any more.'"

Exploring the house with Dunlap one day, Kimsey came across Wright's original drawings of the home in one of the cabinet drawers. "It was a eureka moment," Kimsey recalls. A Memorial Day weekend trip to Taliesin West -- Wright's winter home in Arizona and now home to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation -- to talk to Wright archivists cemented his plans to restore the house to exactly what the architect had wanted.

The restoration process had barely begun when a miscommunication arose between Joan Smith and Kimsey's staff over what to do with the Wright-designed furniture in the home. Smith says she thought Kimsey didn't want the furniture, so she set about finding suitable places for it. The large dining room table and two side tables were donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and two of the smaller plywood tables were sent to be auctioned off to raise money for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago.

This caused a mini-stink within Wright circles, because purists believe that the original furniture should remain in a Wright-designed home whenever possible, Joan Smith says. To quell the criticism, the conservancy says, the tables were pulled from the auction, and the conservancy drew up an agreement whereby the two small tables could end up back at the Marden house if the owner wants them back.

In an interview in July, Kimsey seems surprised to hear this.

"I want them back!" he says. He says he was unaware the furniture was eschewed by his staff and agrees it was a "shame." "Ideally we want as much furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as possible in the house."

To get to the house now, one passes through the cavernous rooms of Kimsey's mansion and up a slight hill to the Marden house, which has been stripped of brambles and weeds to expose its curved terrace and wall of glittering windows.

Strangely, the little house sits so snugly into the side of the hill that the effect of moving from Kimsey's large home -- which he describes as "postmodern French Provincial" -- across a terrace and the few feet to the house is not as jarring as one might expect. A new copper roof now gleams where tar and gravel once lay. Wright had specified decorative copper trim in the original plans, but encasing the roof in copper is a new idea, which might give some preservationists pause.

Inside on a recent day, the house is full of workmen and smells of wood stain. Adams, who was hired to do the restoration, has taken down the African mahogany garage doors and set them on stands in the dining room to be refurbished. He shows off the trademark orange-red tile with Wright's signature by the doorway, then a handsome lamp that Beharka made of interlocking wood pieces -- similar to one that sat in Wright's office at Taliesin in Wisconsin. It will be rehung in its original position next to the large stone fireplace, which Wright saw as the spiritual center of the home.

Kimsey is trying to get the $1 million-plus restoration done and the house furnished by fall, and he hopes to have a cocktail party there soon. He doesn't plan to open the home to the public, but instead to use it for small fundraisers, parties and -- once again with the mischievous twinkle in his eye -- "romantic dinners." Divorced with grown children, Kimsey is considered one of the most eligible bachelors in Washington.

Looking back on the time when he was entertaining thoughts of redoing the house, Kimsey says, "Nobody ever said, 'Don't do it,' but to change the house was such anathema, heresy" to Wright loyalists. "Once you understand the intense devotion these people have to his work, you realize they don't see you as the owner, you're like the trustee. So I decided to restore it back to its original condition -- which by the way was cheaper than renovating -- and everybody breathed a sigh of relief."

Annie Gowen is a reporter for The Post's Metro section.