A Renowned Midcentury Country House That Brings the Outside In

Decades later I learned of the late designer and his American Modern pottery. Wright sold tens of millions of pieces of it in the 1940s and ’50s, earning renown for introducing middle America to modernism.

Then the collecting bug bit me. Wright’s elongated-neck pitchers in rich, simply named colors like Seafoam now line the mantle in my upstate New York living room. Though I’ve long known that the industrial designer’s country estate in Garrison, N.Y., along the Hudson River was a day-trip away and open to the public, I only recently made the drive. What I saw took me aback: Wright’s streamlined, factory-made housewares didn’t prepare me for his experimental, oddball home.

After pulling into the 75-acre property, which he’d named Manitoga, I walked a tree-lined path up a hill, past granite boulders and lush ferns, until I glimpsed the house and its adjacent studio. The structure, finished in the early 1960s, is multilevel but compact. Wright raised his daughter there—his wife had died in 1952—and remained until his death in 1976.

A collection of vertical windows and horizontal roof lines, the home appears to emerge from the side of the cliff, high above a pond that he fashioned from an abandoned granite quarry. Though the term hadn’t yet been invented, Manitoga exemplifies “biophilic” design, an incre-asingly embraced concept that recognizes the many benefits of connecting a building’s occupants to nature. “He clearly was setting [the structure] up to frame the view of the water and the nature around the house,” said Bill Browning, founder of Terrapin Bright Green, a New York consulting firm that specializes in biophilic and environmental buildings. “He’s making a connection to place that is very, very strong.”

Once inside I realized Wright quite literally brought the outside in. On the ground floor, the rough stone of an outside terrace becomes the floor of the living areas. In a corner, a fireplace—a jumble of stacked boulders the Flintstones would have found homey—seems to tumble out of a green plaster wall he embedded with hemlock needles. Leading my eye up, a giant, sinuous cedar-tree trunk supports the two-story ceiling.

Set within this highly organic envelope are sleek synthetic materials: a translucent plastic chandelier hovers like a flying saucer above a white laminate pedestal table. I found other creative juxtapositions—such as copper-covered doors abutting grasscloth cabinet fronts—in the family room, up a set of jagged stone stairs you might expect to find on a hiking trail.

Colorful dried butterflies float between panes of frosted plastic in a sliding bathroom door that I encountered down a hall, one of many instances in which Wright combined flora or fauna with man-made material. This door opened on another Flintstones-friendly structure: a bathtub wall of rough-faced stones from which a hidden pipe fed a waterfall.

To enter the studio, connected to the house by a vine-draped pergola, I turned a cool, smooth doorknob made of an oval stone. Inside, I found a bedroom door clad in peeling birch bark. Adjacent to the built-in couch sits an early 1930s revolving coffee table Wright designed. One of the studio’s walls showcases another experiment: A sheet of synthetic insulation, faced with a panel of green plastic, lets light through its honeycomb structure. According to Donald Albrecht, who has co-curated museum shows on Wright’s work, the designer “had always been interested in nature as a form-giver.” Wright, who once created theater sets, “puts nature on stage’’ at Manitoga, he explained.

Incorporating a bit of Wright into your own home isn’t difficult. His dishware and furniture are readily available online. A divided serving dish, for example, runs $15 on eBay. Grasscloth and birch-bark wall coverings can bring earthiness to your surfaces. American sculptor Ian Collings creates Wright-esque seats, side tables and other objects from rock, frequently left raw. Working and living with stone, he said—shedding light on Wright’s predilection for it—provides “a picture window into the past—the perspective of geologic time.”

MANMADE VS. NATURE

A Wright-like collection of the machined and organic

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