Frank LLoyd Wright: St. Louis

 The Taste of Wright is happening this weekend at the Gordon House here in Oregon. We won't be able to make it this year. You can see pictures here and here (interior kitchen shots) from our visit last year. But I did make it to a new FLW house this past Spring in St. Louis. I was on my  way to the airport from a work meeting and wouldn't you know there just happened to be an FLW house about 30 minutes from the airport. So close I had to call and see if I could be there for the Sunday afternoon tour before my flight out of town. The tours of the Ebsworth Park Home are by reservation only and they only accept 10 people at a time. Lucky for me they had one spot left on the tour! Here are some pictures I took inside the Kraus House. Technically indoor pictures are not allowed but as long as you used a flash and didn't take the picture in front of the docent it seemed to be just fine. So my interior pictures are blurry and technically do not exist. Got it? (wink wink) The docents were a lovely retired couple. The gentleman had been an architect himself and had met FLW several times which added a very personal touch to the tour. I won't go into detail here because I don't want to get the facts wrong, but the basics are that the house was built on the concept of a parallelogram. The house then is shaped like two parallelograms slid together and many of the angles in the house are quite severe and include nontraditional shapes of drawers and beds. It took about a decade to build because no one in St. Louis had built a house like this before and most builders were nervous about taking on such a project. It sounded as though every single change in the house over the years was approved by Mr. Wright and his apprentices and so it remains a fine example of the Usonian type of home that Mr. Wright created. If you're in the St. Louis area, it's only 10 dollars and is so great to be in such a remarkable and well loved little building. If you're in Oregon this weekend you can go to the Gordon House for the celebration or come to Eugene for the Whitaker Block Party, both of which will be scrumptious summer events!

Frank Lloyd Wright's Gordon House in Oregon: the Kitchen

Here it is, the kitchen, my favorite room in the Gordon House in Silverton, Oregon. The house was built in 1963 with the purpose of a pre-fab prototype in mind. The house is not huge unlike many other FLW Custom Homes. The kitchen was my favorite because of it's forethought for modern living. Just check out the refrigerator  - it has wood paneling! The fridge was custom made for the kitchen, as was the stove top. Apparently Mrs. Gordon was not huge fan of the stove top, on the tour I learned that there were lots of problems with the stove top. If you look at the picture you can see the stainless steel backspalsh - except that it's not actually a backsplash it's a lid that can close and add more counter space when not using the stove. This is a wonderful idea that hasn't carried over to our generation of kitchens. The best part of the kitchen though is the sky light and the tall ceilings. While it's very nice aesthetically, especially considering there are no windows in the kitchen but the tall ceiling also served to aide in air circulation and one of the walls housed the chimney for the incinerator (hidden in the cinder block wall next to the built in oven). The kitchen in not huge and it is not connected to the main living space (through the open door above) but it is right next to the front door of the house and directly in front of the service door that Mr. Gordon used for his business and for coming in and out after working the land around the house. Mr. Gordon's office is also directly off the kitchen. So while most people today would be put off by having a somewhat closed off kitchen the reality of the Gordon House was that it was in the center of the action. The Gordon House is a lovely house in a nice setting (it's be relocated from it's original location) and I would encourage folks to go visit it. I'm already planning for the future when I can rent the place out for a special occasion. 

Oregon's Frank Lloyd Wright House, Ninkasi Brew, + Local Food!!!

via Wikimedia

Friends, I don't know how I could have forgotten but . . . this Sunday is the annual summer fundraiser for the Gordon House, Oregon's only Frank Lloyd Wright house. You can check out the details of the event - A Taste of Frank Lloyd Wright - here. I only learned about the fun-draiser heading into it's 8th year about a year ago right after last year's event had occurred. And this time I nearly forgot it until my friend, Mini Monkey, remembered that the event is this weekend. Basically this event is a wonderful opportunity to drink Oregon wine complimented by Oregon food and wander in the world of the FLW Gordon House. I promise of course to take pictures and to post. The good thing about A Taste of FLW is that it is from 3 - 6, allowing me just enough time to drive home to Eugene and make it to Ninkasi's and Slow Food Eugene's Carts and A Cold One Cook Off from 5 - 8pm, the bad thing is that I am going to have to run super long and fast in order to work off all these munching drinking Willamette Valley calories! I can't wait. See you there?

In Flight

Well I made it home for almost 48 hours. Enough time to go to 2 parties and make a trip up to Portland for furniture purchasing and shipment to our house from Hawthorne Vintage. Mr. Monkey will be reassembling the wall unit we purchased while I'm on my work trip in so-hot-it-doesn't-matter-that-it's-a-dry-heat-Phoenix. Next week I'll be back in Phoenix and I have reservations to go with friends to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West in Scottsdale - I'm so frikin' excited!!!