The property is located within Parkwyn Village, a Wright-designed neighborhood that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2022. In 1946, a group of young families wrote to Wright, asking if he would consider designing a housing community for them. “We have just purchased a 47-acre site,” they explained, expressing hope to offer homes for 40 to 60 families priced between $5,000 and $20,000. The architect agreed to lay out roads and house sites and drafted a plan that included 40 roughly-one-acre lots in addition to gardens, tennis courts, and playgrounds on the remaining seven acres. The visionary also designed four of the homes in the community, though many in the neighborhood today are inspired by Wright’s ideas and style.
The McCartney House, one of the four original homes, was built for Ward McCartney, a dentist, and his wife, Helen, who bought their lot in the early days of Parkwyn Village. “Your house is an experimental geometric form: a triangle, or several of them, almost a star. I hope you will enjoy living in it,” Helen, who wrote a short book about building and living in the home, remembers Wright saying when the couple visited Taliesin to collect the blueprints. The property was designed based on a four-foot parallelogram grid, with each wing shaped like a triangle and made from concrete blocks. The site spans 1,671 square feet and includes four bedrooms and two bathrooms.
One of Wright’s First Prairie-Style Homes
A few weeks later, one of Wright’s first Prairie-style homes hit the market in Kankakee, Illinois. Known as the Warren Hickox House, the home sits next to another Wright design, the Bradley House, which a brother and sister—and their respective spouses—commissioned at the turn of the century. The Bradley House, the larger of the two, was built for B. Harley Bradley and his wife, Anna Hickox Bradley, while the Warren Hickox House was designed for Anna’s brother, Warren, and his wife, Laura. The Bradley House is perhaps the more famous of the pair—and often credited as Wright’s first Prairie home—though the Warren Hickox property shares many similar qualities and is just as monumental.
