Seth Peterson Cottage: Frank Lloyd Wright's Last Wisconsin Building
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
On a steep wooded hillside overlooking Mirror Lake, there's an roughly nine-hundred-square-foot cottage that represents the final chapter of Frank Lloyd Wright's long career in Wisconsin.
Seth Peterson had admired Wright since childhood. He applied to Wright's Taliesin Fellowship and was turned away. He sent repeated letters asking Wright to design him a house, and was turned away again. Finally, in nineteen fifty-eight, Peterson sent a one-thousand-dollar retainer. Wright, who was ninety years old and perpetually short of cash, immediately spent it. With no way to return the fee, he accepted the commission.
The design Wright produced for the Mirror Lake site was characteristically daring. The cottage cantilevers over a sandstone ledge above the lake, with floor-to-ceiling windows on the long wall that dissolve the boundary between interior and the woods outside. Horizontal bands of cypress millwork, a massive stone fireplace, and a concrete floor with radiant heat tie the building to the earth while the glass wall lifts it toward the sky.
But Seth Peterson never lived in his house. He died by suicide in nineteen sixty before construction was complete. The cottage was finished by the family that bought it and used as a private retreat until the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources acquired the property in nineteen sixty-six as part of Mirror Lake State Park. For two decades it stood largely unused.
In nineteen eighty-nine a group of volunteers formed the Seth Peterson Cottage Conservancy, negotiated a lease with the state, and undertook a careful restoration. The cottage reopened as the first Frank Lloyd Wright home available for overnight rental anywhere in the world.
It sleeps two and is booked months in advance. Guests wake to the same view over Mirror Lake that Wright drew into his plans for a man who commissioned a house he never got to live in.
