The Wright Time for Household Objects : The great architect’s creations for homes are now commanding respect--and top prices

Anthony De Lorenzo had never bought a household object designed by the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but when a bronze and leaded glass lamp from the noted Robie House in Chicago went up for auction at Christie’s last June, the New York antique dealer couldn’t resist. Past the half-million-dollar mark, bidding became breakneck, and it was only at $704,000 that De Lorenzo claimed the object he longed for.

The price set a world record for 20th-Century decorative arts, but the purchaser paid up without a wince. “It was a bargain,” he says.

De Lorenzo, who previously collected Tiffany lamps, predicts that in three or four years, his Wright lamp could be worth several million dollars.

Indisputably one of the world’s great architects, Frank Lloyd Wright has commanded continuous admiration in the arts, yet his works have only recently emerged from decades of commercial neglect. Some of his houses had been left to crumble, while pieces of his furniture have even been pitched out with the trash.

Now the sudden popularity of Wright in the marketplace is publicly validating the worth that experts have always recognized. At the same time, adaptations of Wright’s designs, being sold by such leading firms as Tiffany & Co., risk vulgarization of his intentions.

With prolific creativity, the crotchety, strong-willed visionary exercised control over all aspects of his constructions, designing everything from improbable cantilevering to new heating systems. Throughout his 70-year career he practiced his pet concept of organic architecture, fashioning buildings in harmony with the landscape and furnishings that grew out of his architecture. In his famous Prairie style, he reinvented the concept of the American home--a single-level house built around a chimney--and he filled it with a full complement of furnishings--chairs, tables, lamps, vases, rugs and fabrics, all functioning as a unified design.

The boom in Wright collecting has made these objects, unwanted for three decades, the highly sought-after prizes of international auctions.

It’s a sharp turn-around from the dark ages for Wright designs, which preceded his death in 1959 and spanned the following generation. In the mid-’60s, the Art Institute of Chicago had only one example of the Wright decorative arts, while owners of Wright houses passed on the furniture to their children, sold it off for the going price of golden oak furniture as they moved, or even threw it out.

Fashionable collecting was focused on Bauhaus and contemporary, if not 18th-Century period styles. Wright’s furniture--solid, geometric and made of oak--did not fit in with the light, sleeker aesthetics.

Besides, as Craig Miller, decorative arts curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, points out, “Most people didn’t know what the furniture was. It was only after the spectacular prices and records broken at auction that objects began to come out of the woodwork and people realized what they had.”

The first fledgling interest in Wright came in the ‘70s with recognition of the Arts and Crafts Movement, begun in England in the 19th Century. An exponent of the movement during his 1900-1915 Prairie period, Wright believed in its tenets of functional furniture, a respect for inherent materials and the concept of total design in which all elements in the environment were in aesthetic harmony--the architecture, the furniture, the gardens, the music. True to his nature, Wright would even arrange the flowers on the dinner table and designed suitable clothes for the owners of his houses.

“This was the beautiful life one lived,” comments Miller. “It was living elevated to a nirvana.”

In 1979, Wright furniture and decorative design was resurrected in a catalogue by David Hanks, “The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright,” which accompanied a Wright exhibition and is still a standard reference work on Wright.

In 1982, Nancy McClelland, head of Christie’s early 20th-Century decorative arts department, organized the firm’s arts and crafts auction, now a semiannual event, in which a Wright window was hammered down at $110,000, still a record price.

The next year the Metropolitan Museum opened the Francis Little Room and concomitantly exhibited decorative objects designed by Wright. The events attracted public attention and collecting Wright began in earnest, with prices starting a rapid ascent.

Today the price of Wright furniture has passed the million-dollar mark and top architectural drawings have sold in six figures.

“Now everybody wants to buy Wright,” says Miller. “It’s become a wonderful magical name.”

Business executives and such Hollywood denizens as Barbra Streisand and producer Joel Silver are collecting Wright and dozens of books on Wright have hit the market. In a gift shop adjoining his corporate collection in Ann Arbor, Mich., Domino Pizza’s owner Thomas Monaghan sells Wright design jewelry and trinkets. And, yes, even Frank Lloyd Wright T-shirts, imprinted with balloons, flags and confetti from the Avery Coonley Playhouse windows. Collecting Wright has also offered the rare titillation of making an unexpected “find.” Wright did not sign his designs, made only on commission, and he issued no catalogues of his work; this makes authentication a process of comparing drawings, photographs and actual objects.

The result of the frenzy has been sudden windfalls with profit percentages reaching the hundreds and thousands. An uncanny number of such stories have cropped up at galleries and auction houses.

McClelland, for example, tells of one magnum price leap. It began in 1943 when a woman bought two urns from the Dana House for what she supposes was about $10 each. It ended in 1985, when the same woman consigned the urns to Christie’s, which subsequently sold them for $75,000 a piece.

Christie’s record-breaking lamp is another tale of Midas-scaled mark-ups. In 1966, a Virginia architect picked up a lamp in a local antique shop for $150. Last year, noticing the high prices of Frank Lloyd Wright, he telephoned the auction house about his lamp. He had a hunch it just might be a Wright. Today it is De Lorenzo’s $704,000 “bargain.”

Many of the early finds were made around Chicago, where Wright designed a number of his masterpiece houses.

Scott Elliot started his Kelmscott Gallery with the profits from a print that caught his eye in a frame shop in 1980. It was a drawing for the rebuilding of Taliesin, Wright’s Wisconsin home, (as well as the name of his fellowship of architects). The print was torn and taped, and the owner let it go for $1,200. Three months later Elliot resold it for $50,000 and opened his gallery selling Frank Lloyd Wright prints on the proceeds.

Like Elliot, William and Deborah Struve, of Chicago’s Struve Gallery, got a leg-up in their business with a Tree of Life window from the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo, N.Y. Returning from a decade of alternative living on a New England farm, the Struves got wind of a Wisconsin architect who had a Wright window, and their associate, Michael FitzSimmons, drove up and brought the window back.

“It was akin to deciding you wanted to be a painting dealer and buying a Picasso as your first painting,” says FitzSimmons, now head of the gallery’s architecture department,

Wright objects have also turned up in unlikely spots. Visiting the son of a sculptor in his New York loft one weekend, Elliot found Wright’s color elevation drawings for La Miniatura in Pasadena, Wright’s first concrete-block house, squirreled away in a pile of newspapers under the kitty litter. He bought the drawings on the spot for $35,000, and on Monday morning sold them to the Museum of Modern Art for $75,000.

“It’s really not unusual for Wright pieces to be found this way,” says Beth Cathers of the New York arts and crafts gallery, Cathers and Dembrosky. Indeed, Cathers tells of a bronze urn found in an Ohio tag sale for $800 this past year. A number of dealers passed it by, thinking it couldn’t be the real thing, she says. One dealer who finally took a chance, turned around and sold it at a country auction for $95,000.

But nobody has collected Frank Lloyd Wright with such a vengeance as Domino Pizza’s Monaghan. In three years, Monaghan has gathered 300 Wright designs, and last spring opened an exhibition space at his Ann Arbor headquarters, along with an architectural bookstore, gift shop and archives, entitled the National Center for the Study of Frank Lloyd Wright. Monaghan has even hired a New York public relations firm and is mounting a Wright exhibit from his collection to tour the country next year.

“We’ve seen prices double in the past two years,” says the center’s director, Sara-Ann Briggs. Valued at $30 million, the collection includes the master bedroom of the Francis Little House (the living room is in the Metropolitan Museum), 22 of the 34 windows from the Avery Coonley Playhouse and the dining room ensemble from the Joseph Husser House, the only element from the house known to survive, purchased for $1.6 million, the highest price paid for Wright furniture.

The ultimate in Wright collecting, however, is to be able to place Wright objects in a Wright house. Joel Silver, producer of the Arnold Schwarzeneger films, is doing just that with the Storrer House in Hollywood, and is renovating Wright’s Auldbrass Plantation in South Carolina.

Says Silver: “They’re tearing things out to sell them, but there’s no value placed on the homes. They’re appraised at whatever the square footage of the house next door is worth.

“It’s insane. There are Frank Lloyd Wright houses that are crumbling and people won’t put money into them, but they’ll spend $1.6 million for a dining room set.”

Silver reportedly purchased the neglected Storrer House in 1984 for $720,000, just slightly more than De Lorenzo’s lamp.

For the more modest pocketbook of most Wright fans, Taliesin Associated Architects in Scottsdale, Ariz., two years ago authorized production of Wright designs, licensing Schumacher for textiles, Cassina (Atelier International, distributors) for furniture and Tiffany for crystal and silver.

While an original Wright barrel chair sold at Christie’s last June for $33,000, a new one can be had for $2,680. Chicago marketing man Steven Kroeter, who thought up the plan, has produced a catalogue of Wright wares ($5, Frank Lloyd Wright Catalogue, Dept WP. Box 4736, Chicago, Ill., 60680-4736), and Tiffany has already sold 12,000 pairs of Wright’s candlesticks.

Some experts point out, however, that the current furniture is made of cherry, not of oak. Colors seem adapted to the ‘80s tastes and designs were taken from drawings that were never crafted. They almost certainly would have been changed by Wright in the course of production.

“Some of them are quite far from the originals,” Hanks says. “It’s hard to call them Wright’s designs. They’re interpretations of Wright designs.”

Yet only a finite number of original Wright objects exist and experts say the flow on the market may soon be slackening. Wright objects at Christie’s Dec. 10 auction are evaluated at $20,000 to $50,000, and Hanks sees prices as leveling off before another climb. But McClellan says: “We feel very bullish about the Frank Lloyd Wright market. The material is so important it’s not suddenly going to become less fashionable.”

Do any good buys in Wright remain? Briggs says Monaghan is looking for early textiles, “the real rarities.” And Hanks recommends Wright’s later Usonian furniture (which inspired a brief Unsonian-like commercial production in the ‘50s), much of which can still be bought for a couple of thousand dollars. “If someone were wise he’d be out collecting it,” he says.

Whatever the period, McClelland issues the well-known collector’s caveat: “The best investments people make are at the top of the market. They increase in price at a far greater rate than less valuable objects.”

Does that mean De Lorenzo’s lamp will really be worth millions of dollars? Quite possibly, experts say. And so it sits softly lighting a corner of De Lorenzo’s living room, quietly acquiring value.