The Darwin Martin House

In nineteen-oh-three, a Larkin Company executive named Darwin Martin wrote to his brother William with a problem. Martin needed a house. His brother had recently employed a young Chicago architect named Frank Lloyd Wright, and thought Darwin should at least meet him. Martin did. He was so persuaded by Wright's ideas that he eventually commissioned not just a house but a complete estate: a main residence, a carriage house, a conservatory, a long pergola connecting the buildings, and a smaller house next door for his sister and her husband.

Wright referred to the Darwin Martin House as the opus. He kept the site plan pinned to his drawing table for nearly fifty years. By the standards of Prairie architecture, the house is unusually large, roughly fifteen thousand square feet across three levels, and unusually complex. Wright broke the interior into rooms of varying ceiling heights, creating a sense of intimacy that the building's scale would otherwise preclude. The central hearth, which anchors the main living space, features gilded brickwork and a sunburst pattern in hand-applied gold leaf.

The windows are extraordinary. Wright designed fifteen distinct stained glass patterns for the estate, incorporating over three hundred ninety-four individual panels, some containing more than seven hundred fifty pieces of iridescent glass. They function as what Wright called light screens, connecting the interior visually to the landscape outside.

Martin's fortune collapsed in the stock market crash of nineteen twenty-nine. He died in nineteen thirty-five. His family abandoned the house two years later. Over the following decades, the estate was subdivided, parts of it demolished, the stained glass windows scattered and sold.

Restoration began in nineteen ninety-five. The project recovered or reproduced almost everything Wright had designed. The house is a National Historic Landmark and now draws roughly forty thousand visitors a year.