The Coonley House, Riverside

Frank Lloyd Wright called the Coonley House in Riverside, Illinois the best house he had ever built up to that point. He designed it between nineteen oh six and nineteen twelve for Avery and Queene Ferry Coonley, a wealthy couple who gave Wright unusual freedom and budget to develop his Prairie Style to its fullest expression. The house sprawls across a corner lot in a low, horizontal composition of stucco panels, Roman brick, and natural wood trim, with a separate playhouse nearby, built in nineteen twelve for a school, that features Wright's signature art-glass windows in confetti-like patterns of circles and squares. The Coonley estate was eventually divided and the main house split into two private residences, but it remains one of the most studied Prairie houses in existence, a benchmark Wright himself returned to repeatedly when explaining what the Prairie Style could achieve at full scale.