For many architecture buffs, the very first stop on a trip to Illinois is the Frank Lloyd Wright Oak Park Home and Studio, the architect’s primary residence from 1889 until 1909. Every day, visitors from across the world travel to the quiet Chicago suburb, which today has the highest concentration of Wright buildings. While in the area, a visit to Wright’s own Oak Park home and studio offers the opportunity to see where many of these structures were designed and how the legendary architect himself lived. Before setting up shop at Taliesin in Wisconsin and later Taliesin West in Arizona, Wright was at work establishing himself and figuring out his distinctive architectural eye in Oak Park. Below, everything you need to know about the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio.
At age 22 in 1889, Wright was a budding architect and newly married to his first wife, Catherine Lee Tobin Wright. He was working for the architecture firm Adler & Sullivan and still years away from taking on his first independent commission and opening his own practice. With money borrowed from his boss, Louis Sullivan, he bought a lot on Forest Avenue in Oak Park and built a home for himself and his wife. In its first iteration, the residence was modest in size, with a primary bedroom, a nursery, and a work space. In 1895 the first major addition was completed, a project that included reconfiguring the downstairs to allow for a larger dining room and a new maid’s room. Upstairs, a playroom was added and the workspace was divided into two bedrooms for their growing family—by the fall of that year, they had welcomed four of their six children.
Wright left Adler & Sullivan in 1893 after a dispute surrounding his independent projects, and he opened his own practice that same year. In 1898, after working in downtown Chicago offices for years, he built a studio wing in his home, which would allow him to be closer to his family and his commissions, many of which were being built in Oak Park. Attached to the home via a passageway, but with a separate entrance on Chicago Avenue, this addition included an office, a double-height drafting room with a balcony on the upper level, a reception hall, and a library.
“This is where he really began his architectural career,” Frank Lloyd Wright Trust curator and director of interpretation Sarah Holian says. “You get to see not only how he created a home for his family—he had six children in what is really quite a modest-size home—but also where so many of the early Prairie designs that he’s known for were created in the adjacent studio.”
Wright left Oak Park and separated from Tobin Wright in 1909. Before leaving, he divided the studio and the home, allowing Tobin Wright and the children to live in the studio wing and rent out the house for income. Wright sold the property in 1925 and later owners divided the building into six units and neglected to preserve the historically significant property.