In 1893, shortly after leaving the firm Adler & Sullivan, Wright was commissioned to build the Winslow House in the Chicago suburb of River Forest. Although Wright had secretly completed several projects around the city while employed at Adler & Sullivan—known as bootleg houses, including Parker House and Thomas Gale House in Oak Park—Winslow House was his first as an independent architect.

At 26, Wright considered the 5,000-square-foot, two-story home the first of his Prairie School buildings. The house features a low-pitched roof with deep eaves, a slightly sunken door, and a symmetrical design divided horizontally between slate and golden Roman brick.

Inside, the five-bedroom, three-bath house includes elements Wright used in his own house in Oak Park, such as an inglenook in the entryway, intricate glass window patterns, and a ground floor fireplace designed as a gathering space.

Unique to the Winslow House, which sits on two-thirds of an acre, is the open floor plan offering end-to-end views and a back of the house with differing geometric shapes that extend into the garden.

Edith and William Winslow commissioned Wright after Adler and Sullivan turned them down, as the firm was uninterested in residential assignments. Winslow Brothers operated a foundry that produced ornamental iron and brass fittings used in turn-of-the-century American skyscrapers and later worked with Wright.

The Winslow House had been vacant for several years and deteriorated when its current sellers, the Vogts, bought it for $1.3 million in 2016. The Vogts invested roughly $1 million into renovating the house, modernizing it with air conditioning, upgrading the electrical system, and redesigning the yard with native plants, a practice Wright himself followed.

“You can almost feel where Wright was experimenting with different forms and different ideas of how to design the house,” the Vogts told Architectural Digest. “We felt that the best way to preserve this house was to make it suitable for a family to live in it and continue the legacy of it being a family home.”

The listing agent, Christie’s International Real Estate, calls Winslow House, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, “a rare opportunity to own a piece of architectural history that has been meticulously updated to meet today’s modern standards.”

Another notable Wright building, the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, was recently put up for auction on the commercial real estate platform Ten-X. It is the only skyscraper Wright built and has been the subject of controversy following perceived mismanagement by its current owners, blockchain entrepreneurs Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard.
 

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