The David and Gladys Wright House is a residence at 5212 East Exeter Boulevard in the Arcadia neighborhood of Phoenix, Arizona, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in an organic style for his son David and daughter-in-law Gladys, it was built from 1950 to 1952. By the 2010s, the house was one of four remaining buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Phoenix and one of nine such buildings in Arizona. The main house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The site also contains a small guesthouse to the northeast.
The main house is a curved structure made of concrete and sits on seven piers; it is accessed by a spiraling ramp. The house has of space, with three bedrooms and four bathrooms, and is made of concrete blocks and mahogany boards. The house forms a 270-degree arc around an interior courtyard, with a kitchen to the northeast, a living room to the southwest, and bedrooms to the southeast. The interior uses circular motifs and geometric shapes, in addition to furnishings designed by Wright, such as a carpet. The guesthouse is built of similar materials to the main house but is much smaller, with one primary room.
David Wright and his wife Gladys acquired land for the house in 1950 and 1951. After the building's completion, the couple initially invited guests, though they had stopped doing so by the 1960s. The couple continued to live in the house until their respective deaths. After Gladys died in 2008, her granddaughters sold the house the next year to a limited partnership, JT Morning Glory Enterprises. The new owner canceled a planned renovation of the house, instead reselling it in June 2012 to the real-estate development firm 8081 Meridian, who planned to demolish and redevelop it. Following efforts to preserve the house as a landmark, it was sold to Zach Rawling in December 2012. Rawling attempted to repurpose the house as a museum and cultural center before trying to donate it to the School of Architecture at Taliesin, though neither plan was carried out. After Benson Botsford LLC bought the house in August 2020, the family of Bing Hu and Wenchin Shi moved into the residence, renovating it.
Description The house was designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and built for the architect's fourth child David, along with David's wife Gladys. It is located at 5212 East Exeter Boulevard, with an alternate address of 4505 North Rubicon Avenue, in the Arcadia neighborhood of Phoenix, Arizona, United States. The site covers either or . There is a detached single-story guesthouse to the northeast. The surrounding area includes detached ranch homes, some of which have been replaced with newer mansions. These include a house to the south, designed by Wright's eldest son Lloyd Wright. Prior to the development of the David and Gladys Wright House, the land had been part of block H within the politically separate subdivision of Arcadia. The site was among hundreds that were created in 1919 when Arcadia was platted out into multiple land lots.
By 2012, the house was one of four remaining buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Phoenix and one of nine such buildings in Arizona. The house is also one of two that Wright designed for his children, the other being the Robert Llewellyn Wright House in Bethesda, Maryland. An example of organic architecture, the David and Gladys Wright House has a circular plan. The house uses numerous design elements seen in Wright's other buildings; for instance, Wright used natural materials from the surrounding area, arranged the living room around a central hearth, and used geometric motifs inside. The house wraps around an interior courtyard that originally had an almond-shaped pool and bougainvillea flowers, though the pool has since been infilled.
Main house
Exterior The house is raised on seven piers, which are made of curved concrete blocks. At the time of construction, the area was full of orange trees, and Wright wanted his son and daughter-in-law to be able to see above the trees. The pier design allowed breezes to pass through the building as well. The rooms themselves are placed on a concrete slab that is cantilevered above the piers. Circular columns carry the roof above the cantilevered floor slabs. The exterior of this floor slab is decorated with a cast-concrete frieze. The frieze contains scalloped patterns, which was cast using aluminum formwork. The decorations are similar to those used at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel and at several houses in Greater Los Angeles. The house's outer wall forms a circular arc with a radius.
The facade is mostly composed of rectangular concrete blocks, which are hollow and are filled with pumice. To create the impression of a curved facade, rounded blocks were used for the piers, and smaller blocks were used in walls with sharp curves. Wright left gaps in between the blocks to create contrasting light and dark patterns, and he applied silicone-based paint onto the concrete for waterproofing. Glazed window panes are used as well; these windows are flat, contrasting with the rest of the facade. There is a circular window just outside the kitchen, which is similar to those in Wright buildings such as the Marin County Civic Center, Gammage Memorial Auditorium, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. To take advantage of natural light, there are floor-to-ceiling windows on the southern wall of the master bedroom and living room. The other windows have miters to give the impression of invisible corners.
A ramp ascends counterclockwise from an entry courtyard at the northeast to the front door at the house's southwest corner. Though there are claims that the spiral ramp predated the design of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Wright had designed buildings with spiral ramps as early as the 1920s. The David and Gladys Wright House and the Guggenheim Museum are two of three extant Wright structures with spiral designs, the other being the V. C. Morris Gift Shop in San Francisco. Just outside the front entrance, a second ramp ascends from the main floor to the roof deck. Wright wanted his son and daughter-in-law to be able to observe the nearby desert and Camelback Mountain from the roof. The rest of the roof is painted turquoise and has diagonal seams.
Interior The house covers , with three bedrooms and four bathrooms. The main floor forms a 270-degree arc around the courtyard; it is divided into modules, each of which cover 10 degrees of the arc. Each room occupies nearly the entire width of the house. There are smaller spaces leading to larger rooms, an example of the compression-and-release principle that Wright espoused. According to House & Home magazine, the house contained "literally no 90° angle" because all the rooms are curved. The floors and walls are made of concrete, and many of the furnishings are made of Philippine mahogany. The interior spaces have mahogany-board ceilings, doors, and window frames. The interior uses circular motifs, in addition to geometric shapes including squares and hexagons. When the Wrights lived there, the house had recessed ceiling lamps, which David rarely used. Instead, the house was illuminated by natural light during the daytime and exterior floodlights at night. From the outset, the house also had a built-in air conditioning system.
The layout, described by House & Home as an "in-line plan", consists of rooms arranged in succession, similarly to Wright's other designs such as the Lloyd Lewis House. Just inside the entrance is a coat closet. Next to it is a cylindrical kitchen, a double-height space occupying the northwestern portion of the arc. The circular living room occupies the center (southwestern corner) of the arc. The living room features a conical fireplace, described by The Arizona Republic as resembling a Native American kiva. There is a dining niche at one end of the living room, next to the kitchen and living room fireplace. A hallway, along the inner portion of the arc, connects the living room to the bathrooms and bedrooms. The southeastern portion of the house contains the bedrooms, with the master bedroom cantilevered off the end of the arc. The house has three bedrooms in total, all of which face outward. The master bedroom has an attached en-suite bathroom and a conical fireplace. The two other bedrooms share a bathroom which also faces outward. All of the rooms have views of both the interior courtyard and the exterior landscaping.
Wright designed many of the furnishings. For example, he designed a carpet with a "March balloons" pattern, consisting of colorful circular motifs, for the living room. The original carpet was manufactured by a Puerto Rican firm based on a 1926 design; a reproduction was installed after the original carpet was sold off. Though not designed by Wright, the living room also had a grand piano, which was later moved to the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois. Wright was also responsible for the design of the dining room's round table, the house's chairs, and the bedside desk in David's master bedroom. Built-in furniture of red Philippine mahogany is installed throughout the house. During his lifetime, David left many of his father's original decorative details intact, down to such items as the custom-made garbage cans.
Guesthouse The guesthouse, designed by John Howe, is built of similar materials to the main house. The roofline slopes up from south to north, toward Camelback Mountain. The rectangular floor plan consists of a bedroom that doubles as living and dining space, in addition to a kitchenette and a bathroom. To conserve space, the guest house incorporates various pieces of built-in furniture, including a sofa bed. The interior has mahogany window frames, ceilings, and doors, in addition to a cylindrical fireplace. There is a carport and storage rooms at the guesthouse's western end. Sources disagree over whether the guesthouse has , , or . Because it was hidden in a citrus grove, the guesthouse remained little-known into the 21st century.
History
Wright ownership
Development
In 1950, Frank Lloyd Wright began drawing up plans for a house to be occupied by his son David and daughter-in law Gladys. David had asked his father to design the house after realizing that none of his six siblings had asked their father to design their houses. According to Wright's archivist Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, the architect drew up preliminary plans for the building on a blank sheet of paper at his office in Taliesin West, spending at most one hour on these drawings. The drawings for the house were originally titled "How to Live in the Southwest", which were adapted from a generic design. That May, David and Gladys bought a site in Arcadia, lot 7, from the Patrick family. The Wrights bought an adjacent parcel, lot 8, from the Patricks in January 1951. This allowed the site to be accessed both from the west on Rubicon Avenue and from the south on Exeter Boulevard.
The engineering drawings had been finished by February 1951. David, a concrete machinery salesman by trade, was the general contractor for his own house. Gordon Chadwick was hired as the construction supervisor, while Ray Parrish was the foreman for the project; both had formerly apprenticed under Frank. The original proposal called for four bedrooms, later downsized to three. The residence was also supposed to be made of wood, but David requested that it instead be made of concrete. At the time, concrete was not commonly used as a construction material in residences. Furthermore, David specified that only his company could make the concrete blocks that were used in the house's construction.