A legendary architect is now building homes from beyond the grave — sort of.
Seattle-based Lindal Cedar Homes is now selling house kits inspired by the late, respected American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who passed away at age 91 in 1959 — and whose celebrated existing homes come in rare supply.
Since launching the designs in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the School of Architecture at Taliesin in 2018, 10 kits from the Lindal Imagine Series, as the designs are known, have been sold, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Of those, four have been completed so far.
“In the Lindal Imagine Series, we wanted to modernize the homes themselves while remaining respectful of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian designs and underlying principles,” Aris Georges, a graduate of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and home design professional for Lindal Cedar Homes, explained to The Post. “In a Usonian home, the walls are independent elements around which space flows like water around a boulder, not like confining boxes. Walking through the house should be like taking a walk in the forest.”
The series includes nine designs to choose from, including a three-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom called Crystal Springs based on Wright’s Bachman-Wilson home; the 1,256-square-foot Mirror Lake, based on Wright’s Seth Peterson cottage, his final Usonian design; and the one-bedroom, one-bathroom Highland Park, an original Usonian design by Lindal.
One kit buyer, a 60-year-old father of four named Mark Lloyd, purchased the Crystal Springs model and found setting it up to be a good time.
“It was fulfilling and it was fun,” he told the Journal of setting up the house, for which he did the majority of the electrical work himself.
Lloyd paid slightly less than $300,000 for his kit in 2019. A current buyer would reportedly pay 40% more today. However, considering the price of most modern houses, let alone ones with as high-minded a design sense as a Frank Lloyd Wright, it’d still arguably be a steal in this economy.