We drive through the verdant hills of Pennsylvania for hours. The goal is Fallingwater, a house with its famous waterfall, designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
I had no idea that just getting there would be so beautiful. We have arrived weeks too early for the fall leaves. There is no way to judge this. My son has lived in Pennsylvania for five years and his best estimate was the first or second week in October.
Not this year. The trees are stubbornly green. The occasional maple has put on its flaming ball gown, but most of the forest is not even thinking about the prom.
No matter. After the sere of Southern California, the green of Pennsylvania is restful to the eye and calming to the soul.
Then we get to Fallingwater in the rural mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania.
America’s most famous architect named and designed it, so I expected to hear falling water. But I didn’t expect to fall in love with the sound and the idea of all that moving water.
I grew up in the desert of New Mexico. Every time I hear a waterfall or the rush of a river, it is a miracle to me.
The house is cantilevered from the rocks. It hangs, levitates really, like a diving board over the clamor of the waterfall. As we learn on the tour, all the balconies are balanced over the water to maximize the sound of the cascade.
The house that Wright designed for the Kaufmann department store family as a “weekend home” is a mansion to most of us. It has stone floors, wooden cabinets, glass panes looking over trees, stone fireplaces. It is as natural as Wright could make it.
The house is anchored to a boulder, and the house fits between the boulder and the family’s favorite trees. They wanted their sylvan setting to remain. They didn’t move a tree or boulder or streamlet to build this perfect house. The house embraces nature.
The furniture is low and compact, so your eye goes to the trees outside. Wright wanted you to see — not the trunks or the crowns of the trees —but the leaves, the gently moving green verdant, alive part of the trees.
To a desert rat from New Mexico this sandstone building that unites art and nature isn’t a weekend home or even a mansion. It’s a miracle. Where water runs through your days and into your dreams.
The uneven stone floors must be arctic on feet in the winter. I keep having to remind myself that this was built as a SUMMER home.
An upper house, added later for guest and staff quarters, is just as beautifully designed, and the main house below is blank on the back wall to give everyone privacy.
Here at Fallingwater, long before there were open floor plans in American homes, Wright designed a living room, dining room, music room and study all focused on the same fireplace and looking out at the same lovely trees.
After the official tour is over and I am free to explore the grounds, I realize why the rooms, especially the bedrooms, seem so cramped. They didn’t spend much time inside and I wouldn’t either.
Many of the trees are the same ones the Kaufmanns loved in the 1930s. They are stately and tall. They shade us on this suddenly sunny afternoon in October.
We stop. Hear the wind sough through the trees. Hear the squirrels and the birds click and chirp in the overstory. We stand beneath the stately pines and listen to the river tumbling over the stones. Falling water is all you need to feel at home here.
If You Go
The guided tour costs $30 for adults and $18 for youth. Allow two hours on the grounds. The tour includes climbing more than 100 steps. Reservations are required. No photography or sketching is allowed inside the house.
The regular season is mid-March to Thanksgiving weekend. Daily except Wednesday 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m. See website for additional days
Children must be 6 years old to tour the house (9 years old for special tours.) 774-329-8501, www.fallingwater.org
