Wright at Home

Frank Lloyd Wright had a question for Isadore and Lucille Zimmerman when they approached him in the late 1940s about designing a house in what Isadore called “ultra-conservative New England.”

What will the neighbors think?

Three years later, the answer was in. Wright designed a Usonian-style house for the Zimmermans' three-quarter-acre corner lot in Manchester, New Hampshire. The one-story home is low and lean, 107 feet long, with only a string of small, cement windows to relieve the brick facade.

Neighbors thought it looked like a chicken coop.

Today, it's a museum piece, bequeathed to Manchester's Currier Museum of Art when the Zimmermans died in the 1980s. To the thousands of visitors who troop reverently through the house each year, it looks like a classic from the last great design phase of an American legend.

Known for his sweeping, Prairie-style designs, based on the wide-open spaces of the American grasslands, Wright came late in life to see a need for low-cost housing that could be mass-produced. The new design—called Usonian, for United States of North America—would incorporate the principles of Prairie style, but on a much smaller scale.

The houses would fit snugly into their surroundings. There would be no basements or attics, and no exterior adornment. All cabinets, storage spaces and bookshelves would be built-in. Furniture would be designed for each house. Vehicles would get a carport, not a garage.

Heating elements would be embedded in the floor, an early version of radiant heating. Ceilings would be board and batten—in the Zimmermans' case, made of warm Georgia cypress. With no interior walls, the inside would look like the outside. Lights would be recessed. Brick, cement and wood would blend to create a natural shelter that soothed both the eye and the soul. The goal was serenity and symmetry.

The Zimmermans took up residence in 1952, bringing only clothes, books and a grand piano. They stayed for more than thirty-five years.

By the time the Currier Museum took on the house, the heating elements in the floor had failed, as they tended to do in Usonian houses. The Zimmermans had replaced the original roof with asphalt shingles. Searching for a word to describe the effect, one of the museum's docents could only say, “Awful.”

The museum dug up the floor, fixed the heating system and put down a new surface of cement mixed with Cherokee red paint, a color that Wright used extensively. It put 9,000 tiles back on the roof, at a cost of $183,000.

Today, the house stands on a busy corner. Traffic hums continuously on two sides. But enter the house, and noise fades away. And a surprise awaits: Stark and seemingly cold from the outside, the house is all warm woods and earth tones inside. A couch big enough to seat twelve is built into one long wall. A fireplace separates the living room from the dining area, built-in shelves of cypress lining one side.

The back wall is almost all glass and looks out into the backyard, where oaks and birches tower over abundant rhododendrons. All that glass makes the yard feel as though it's part of the room. It's hard to tell where the outdoors ends and the indoors begins.

The property slopes by about five feet, and Wright slotted the house into a gentle hillock so that one of its bedrooms looks out on ground level, making the home feel like an organic extension of the land. That's what Wright meant by serenity.

Enter the symmetry: Each concrete square in the floor is four feet wide and four feet long. Wooden casements that create windows in the glass wall are four by four. The dining room table is four by four.

The board-and-batten ceiling alternates three-inch boards and ten-inch boards. The shelves are three inches thick. The dining-room table has a three-inch overhang and is twenty-six inches high, a multiple of thirteen.

The house cocoons two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a galley kitchen, a living room and a dining area, all neatly tucked into 1,700 square feet.

The house, Isadore Zimmerman wrote to Wright in 1952, is “an experience we would not miss for all the monetary riches in the world.... Utility is married to beauty [and] the two become one.”

By then, he was able to report, “Even our New England neighbors love it.”

EDITOR'S NOTE  The Zimmerman House is open for guided tours Thursday through Monday, from April to early January. Reservations are required. Admission is $11 for adults and $8 for seniors and students. For reservations and information, call (603) 669-6144, ext. 125.