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| Fallingwater |
It is almost impossible to describe Fallingwater, the
incredible home that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the Kauffman family in
the early 1930s. First of all, it is
cantilevered over a waterfall. It is
attached to a huge boulder of rock on the side of the Bear Run stream and parts
of that boulder are inside the house in the kitchen as a shelf and in the
living room as a hearth for the fireplace.
Most of the walls (inside and out) are constructed of locally quarried
stone, or made of glass. The many levels of the
home all have outdoor patios overlooking the stream and the waterfall. The patio railings are walls of rounded
concrete painted the creamy yellowish color that nearby rhododendron leaves
turn in the Fall. This magnificent
creation feels as if it is part of the forest where it sits, and at the same
time feels like a piece of whimsy that was somehow placed in the forest to
surprise and delight us.
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| Approaching Fallingwater through the woods |
To reach the house, you walk along a gravel path carved out
of the forested rocky hillside. As you
walk, the house slowly comes in to view.
You see glimpses of light color between the sea of green leaves in front
of you. As you get closer, the light
patches shape into horizontal lines that echo the strata of the brown and grey
rock on the hillside next to you. Finally,
the house comes fully into view, and you just have to stand there and wonder at
it. It looks odd and strangely beautiful;
a rushing stream with a beautiful waterfall, with a series of round edged
patios, a glass tower, and stone structures above it. Oh, how wonderful it would be to live in a
house that like and have nothing to do all day but stand on the porches looking
at the view, or sit inside and look outside through the floor to ceiling glass
windows and doors!
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| Stairs from the living room to the stream, note the "quick dip" pool on the right |
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Fallingwater was designed and built for the Kauffman family,
owners of the prosperous Kauffman’s department store in Pittsburgh. They owned this piece of mountain and had
used a primitive log cabin on the property as a weekend retreat from smoky, industrial
Pittsburgh. They replaced the cabin with
this home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Fallingwater has a large great room with living and dining areas and an
enormous fireplace, a kitchen, 4 bedrooms and baths, a guest house and servants
quarters. There are many pieces of
Wright designed furniture including a clever sideboard that can be repurposed
as extra tables for dinner. Two built in
desks have half-moon shapes cut out of them to allow the windows next to them
to swing open.
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| A place with running water and soap to wash if you get muddy in the woods |
There are steps from the
living room down into the middle of the stream.
There is a walled off pool area in the stream for a quick dip on a hot
day, and a foot bath (with soap) by the front door for rinsing off, if
you got dirty hiking in the woods, before you enter the house. There is a six-foot deep swimming pool. This is a big step up from a log cabin
(without electricity or water) in the woods.
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| Attached to a boulder and cantilevered over a stream |
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| Close up of where the building is attached to the boulder |
You need to plan ahead to visit Fallingwater. When we looked online on a Thursday in October,
the earliest we could get tickets was for Sunday afternoon. Tickets are $30 each. You are informed to arrive 30 minutes before
your ticket time, and that the time of your tour may be up to 20 minutes after
your ticket time. When you arrive, you
are checked in at a gatehouse, where they verify that you have already
purchased a ticket online. The sign at
the entrance said that there were no more tickets to tour the house for the
day, but tickets to walk on the grounds were still available. From there you drive to a parking area near
the Visitors Center.
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| Walls built of stone quarried from the property |
The folks here have
a well-choreographed way to handle the large number of visitors to the site. The
schedulers at the Visitors Center give you the number of the small group you
will be touring with. Groups are called
every 5 minutes and our group would not be called for 20 minutes, so we had
plenty of time to visit the museum shop, café, restrooms and art gallery
there. When your group is called, you
are met by a greeter who gives you the history of the home and directs you to
walk down the path to the house.
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There
you are met by your well-informed guide.
The time that you spend in each location in the house matches with the
timing of the other groups so that 4 groups are inside or passing through the
main room at the same time without bumping into each other. You head up narrow stairways, into bedrooms
and out onto balconies without ever seeing the other groups. You work your way up the house from the
lowest level to the highest, and up the hill to the guest house, and are
finally met by a fundraiser for the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy (the group to whom the
Kauffman family gave the house and property) with a pitch for financial support.
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| View from an overlook |
From there you are free to roam the grounds
and take photos of the exterior of the building. Well-marked locations have been constructed
along the hillside with the best views of the house. It is a very well thought-out visitor
experience.
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