Zimmerman House

In nineteen forty-nine, a Manchester doctor named Isadore Zimmerman and his wife Lucille wrote a letter to the most famous architect in America. They were not wealthy in the way that commissioned grand houses. Isadore was a physician. Lucille was a homemaker with a passion for art and music. But they believed that the way a house was designed shaped the life lived inside it, and they wanted Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright said yes.

What he designed was a Usonian house, a concept he had been developing since the nineteen thirties as a democratic alternative to the European-influenced mansions he had spent his early career building. Usonian homes were meant for the American middle class: single story, built close to the ground, with flat roofs and long cantilevered overhangs to control light by season. They brought the outside in through clerestory windows and used local, natural materials rather than ornament.

The Zimmerman house, completed in nineteen fifty-one on Heather Street in Manchester's North End, was all of that. But Wright also designed everything inside it: the furniture, the garden plantings, the hexagonal napkins on the dining room table, the Japanese paper lamps in the living room, the angular wooden mailbox by the front door. Every detail was part of a single integrated vision. The house was not a container for objects. It was itself the object.

Isadore and Lucille lived there for the rest of their lives. They changed almost nothing. They maintained everything. When Lucille died in nineteen eighty-eight, she left the house and its contents, along with an endowment, to the Currier Museum of Art just across the city. She wanted it preserved and opened to the public.

The Currier now stewards two Wright houses on the same street, the only museum in the country to do so. Both are open for guided tours, and together they form the only Wright-designed homes in New England accessible to the public.

Most cities that have a Frank Lloyd Wright house are not surprised to have it. Manchester, New Hampshire, is a former textile mill town of a hundred thousand people. The Zimmerman house is a genuinely unexpected thing to find here, and that is part of what makes it so worth finding.