Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio

The home and design laboratory where a 22-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright invented the Prairie Style, and the place he abandoned in a scandal that reshaped both his life and the trajectory of American architecture.

In 1889, a 22-year-old draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright borrowed $5,000 from his employer, the architect Louis Sullivan, to build a home for his new family in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. The house became more than a residence: over the next two decades, Wright treated it as a working laboratory, remodeling and expanding it repeatedly as his architectural ideas evolved, and adding a dedicated studio wing in 1898 to house his growing independent practice.

It was in this studio that Wright developed the Prairie Style, an architectural approach defined by low horizontal lines, open interior floor plans, and buildings deliberately integrated with the flat midwestern landscape around them, a radical departure from the ornate Victorian homes common at the time. The style would go on to influence American residential architecture for generations.

Wright's time in Oak Park ended abruptly in 1909, when he abandoned his wife, six children, and thriving practice to travel to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a former client, a scandal that shocked the community and effectively ended his residency there. Oak Park and neighboring River Forest retain roughly 25 Wright-designed buildings, the largest concentration anywhere in the world, and the Home and Studio itself was restored to its 1909 appearance and now operates as a museum.