DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY
The house Frank Lloyd Wright built for Roland Reisley in 1959 in Pleasantiville, NY, might be more affecting than his better-known houses in Chicago. It was the third and final house he built in the 26-house Usonian community there, a spread of one-and-a-half-acre circular plots. Each house is unique, designed in a brazen modern language by Wright or one of his disciples. And each house is modest – by contemporary standards, at least – with a living area, dining room, three or four small bedrooms, patio, and carport. Most are one level, and are located at the tops of the small hills that run through the site, offering lovely views.
The Reisley House is built on a grid of equilateral triangles, so that all its walls meet at 120-degree or 60-degree angles. This creates dramatic roof and wall lines that exaggerate perspective views. While the geometries seem eccentric and impractical, they shape dynamic, graceful interior spaces. The house has an open plan, and only the bedrooms, bathrooms and closets are closed with doors. The major rooms slide seamlessly into one another: vestibule into living room into dining room into hallway, and – when the doors are thrown open, as they were on the summer afternoon I visited – into patio and lawn.
The house is anchored by heavy retaining walls and chimneys, which are finished with local stones set in a rough horizontal ashlar. Interior walls are finished with gold-stained cypress panels that unfold into bedboards, bookcases, banquettes, and tables, all constructed from the same wood. There’s drama in the low thresholds and narrow halls one passes through moving from one room to the next. And then, as one steps inside, there is uncommon repose.
Photography by Roland Reisley, from his book Usonia, New York: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright.