Fallingwater, Built on Brave Choices and Still Unconventional

Ask most Americans to name the most important house in the country, and they're likely to say the White House.

Pose the same question to an architect, however, and the answer may well be Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, the house that famously sits on top of a waterfall.

Architects revere Fallingwater, not only for its extraordinary design. It's also a testament to what can happen when, architecturally speaking, all the planets align -- in this case a great design talent paired with an amazing site and a one-in-a-million client. Edgar Kaufmann, a department store magnate who wanted a weekend place for family getaways, had deep pockets, sophisticated taste, experience working with an architect, and, most important, a willingness to leap into the great unknown and build a house that breaks with tradition in just about every conceivable way.

Designed in 1935, Fallingwater, in rural Mill Run, Pa., is now owned by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and open to the public. On a recent visit, I saw why designers think the house is so special. Deftly combining subtlety, serendipity, simplicity and surprise, Wright's masterpiece rises to the level of the sublime. More than 70 years later, it still offers ideas for anyone contemplating a new house.

As I began the guided tour, I quickly discovered that I didn't know Fallingwater at all. I knew only the famous photograph that shows the house cantilevered over a waterfall.

The first surprise was that the only way to see the waterfall is from outside, at the spot where visitors take their own version of the iconic photograph. Inside the house, you only hear it. According to the tour guide, Wright thought that the sound of water established a more intimate connection with nature than the sight of it. Perhaps so, but I also suspect that Wright, like a seasoned actor who knows better than to share a stage with an animal or child, did not want competing visuals. (This aspect alone marks Edgar Kaufmann as an unusual client. Most owners would have insisted on being able to see the falls from every room in the house.)

The size of the house and the terraces were the opposite of what I expected. With 2,885 square feet, the house is not that big, while the 2,445-square-foot area of outdoor terraces is more extensive than the famous photograph conveys.

The biggest surprise to a Fallingwater visitor, however, is the economy of design and how a master like Wright achieved so much with so little. The floor plan is simple and straightforward. The main living level has one large space; the upper two floors have four modest bedrooms and bathrooms, one for each Kaufmann family member plus a guest room. Reflecting the 1930s belief in the health benefits of sunbathing, each bedroom has a terrace almost as big as the bedroom itself.

Wright used two materials, concrete and sandstone that was quarried on the property, for the structure and the exterior and interior finish materials. His palette was restricted to three colors -- the natural gray of the sandstone, yellow ocher (the concrete is painted both inside and out) and Cherokee red. (The metal window casements are also painted.)

Combining such a spare aesthetic with a flat roof and the prominent horizontal bands that edge Fallingwater's terraces, another architect at that time might have produced a spare, modernist house that people today would regard as cold and impersonal. Because of Wright's genius, though, this house leaves the opposite impression. The rough-hewn sandstone floors and walls indicate a traditional craftsman at work, and the rounded edges of all the concrete corners soften the look of this man-made material. The ocher is not found in the natural landscape in this area of Pennsylvania; nonetheless, it blends perfectly with the changing seasonal colors of the surrounding woods and makes this most unnaturally shaped house look like it has always been there.

Inside, the large living area on the main floor is far less grand but vastly more impressive than today's McMansion great room, which most often relies on sheer size, ceiling height and must-haves like an enormous wall-hung plasma television for impact.

By contrast, a visitor to Fallingwater's living room is initially captivated by what's outside and doesn't notice the room at all. The panoramic view of the surrounding woods, seen through a ribbon of windows and glass doors that run across three sides of the room, is astonishing. The room itself is both modern and timeless. All that glass is definitely 20th century, while the rough-cut stone floors and walls could be 500 years old. The more or less rectangular room is organized into five areas -- a modestly-sized work/study space and two seating areas along the windows, a dining table and buffet at the rear, and a music alcove for listening to phonograph records.