F. F. Tomek House

At one fifty Nuttall Road in Riverside stands a house that documents Frank Lloyd Wright in mid-transformation. Ferdinand Frederick Tomek, a factory worker in the picture-frame trade, commissioned Wright to design his home in nineteen oh four, and construction was complete by nineteen oh six. The result is a textbook Prairie Style composition: a strong horizontal silhouette, wide overhanging eaves, and rooms that flow openly from one to the next.

Architectural historians value the Tomek House because it sits precisely between two milestones in Wright's career. It refined ideas he had been developing for years, and those refinements fed directly into his Robie House in Chicago, finished in nineteen ten and widely regarded as the purest expression of Prairie Style ever built. In that sense the Tomek House is not a footnote, it is a step. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety-nine.