Seth Peterson Cottage: A Wright House Born from a Bounced Retainer

The Seth Peterson Cottage is one of the last houses Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed, and it came to exist almost by accident.

Seth Peterson had admired Wright since boyhood. He applied to the Taliesin Fellowship, the apprenticeship program Wright ran at his Wisconsin studio, and was turned away. He wrote to Wright several times asking the architect to design him a house. Wright said no. So in nineteen fifty-eight, Peterson mailed Wright a check for one thousand dollars. Wright, who was famously, chronically short of money despite his fame, spent the check before he could return it. Bound by the deposit, he accepted the commission.

What Wright designed for Peterson was a single-room cottage perched on a sandstone promontory above Mirror Lake, in a state park near the Wisconsin Dells. The exterior walls and a massive central fireplace are built from horizontal layers of local sandstone, quarried to match the rock of the bluff on which the house sits. Floor-to-ceiling glass on the lake side makes the boundary between inside and outside almost invisible. The roof extends outward in a broad overhang, and the house seems to grow from the rock rather than being placed upon it.

Peterson never lived in it. By the time construction was nearly complete in nineteen sixty, the young man, only twenty-three years old, had grown increasingly troubled and took his own life. Frank Lloyd Wright died in nineteen fifty-nine, also before the house was finished.

The cottage sat abandoned for decades, deteriorating inside its state park. In nineteen eighty-eight, a local resident named Audrey Laatsch formed the Seth Peterson Cottage Conservancy and raised more than three hundred thousand dollars to restore the building. It reopened in nineteen ninety-two, not as a museum but as a rental property, making it the first Wright house in the world available for overnight stays. Guests still book it weeks in advance.