Seth Peterson Cottage: Wright's Last Gift
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
On a wooded promontory above Mirror Lake, there is a small stone cottage that holds a remarkable biography, and a sad one.
In nineteen fifty-eight, a young Wisconsin state computer programmer named Seth Peterson had a dream he had carried since boyhood: to own a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. He had applied to Wright's Taliesin apprenticeship program and been turned away. He had written to Wright requesting a commission and been ignored. Finally, in a stroke of practical ingenuity, he simply mailed the then-ninety-one-year-old architect a one-thousand-dollar retainer. Wright, who was famously and perpetually short of cash, spent the money immediately. Without funds to return it, he had no choice but to take the job.
What Wright designed for Peterson was compact by his standards, just eight hundred and eighty square feet, but fully realized. The exterior walls are coursed horizontal layers of local sandstone, the same stone used for the massive central fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling windows open the main room toward the lake. The roof extends far past the walls in the classic Usonian overhang. Every element integrates with the natural setting rather than imposing on it.
But Seth Peterson never slept there. Construction began in nineteen fifty-nine, shortly after Wright himself died on April ninth of that year, at the age of ninety-one. In nineteen sixty, before the cottage was finished, Peterson died by suicide. The house was completed by new owners, purchased by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in nineteen sixty-six as part of Mirror Lake State Park, and then quietly deteriorated for two decades.
The cottage might have been lost entirely. In the late nineteen eighties, a local resident named Audrey Laatsch spotted its ruins from a canoe on Mirror Lake. She organized a grassroots restoration campaign. A three-hundred-thousand-dollar project rebuilt the cottage, including a radiant-heated floor from Wright's original design that had never actually been installed. It reopened in June of nineteen ninety-two as the first Frank Lloyd Wright-designed structure available to rent for overnight stays.
Tonight it rents for a few hundred dollars. There is a waiting list.
