Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Cultured Traveler

In Frank Lloyd Wright Country, Architecture and Apple Pie

Of the three Wright homes clustered within miles of one another, the Duncan House, in Acme, is the only one you can sleep in.Credit...Rob Cardillo for The New York Times

In 1934, E. J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store magnate, took Frank Lloyd Wright to a section of untrammeled woods in southwestern Pennsylvania called Bear Run. Mr. Kaufmann hoped to build his summer home here, in a glen thick with maple and hemlock trees, where water pooled and then dashed over a sequence of cater-cornered rock ledges.

Wright approved of the view. He had dreamed of setting a house over a waterfall since his first travels to Japan, in 1905, where he bought a Hokusai print of a cottage perched beside a steep cascade. In this Appalachian wilderness, he finally found the right spot. He wrote to Mr. Kaufmann a few days later, saying that a “domicile has taken vague shape in my mind to the music of the stream.” This house would become Fallingwater, perhaps Wright’s most iconic design, and one of 10 structures by him that the United States nominated last year to become Unesco World Heritage sites.

Fallingwater was built out of hand-hewn sandstone, glass, concrete, steel — and smoldering indignation. Wright was desperate to one-up the European modernists, like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, who had run his career aground. Mr. Kaufmann, meanwhile, wanted to thumb his nose at Pittsburgh’s priggish ruling class, which declined to give a Jewish merchant (and noted philanderer) a seat at its power table.

Once built, Fallingwater was rapidly mythologized, its reputation goosed by everyone from Mr. Kaufmann’s self-aggrandizing son Edgar Jr. to the Museum of Modern Art, Ayn Rand and press barons like William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce. “Without these interventions,” writes Franklin Toker in his authoritative 2003 study “Fallingwater Rising,” “how likely was it that a house in a remote forest 18 miles from the Mason-Dixon Line would become the poster child for modern architecture worldwide?”

Fallingwater now brings 160,000 visitors a year to this remote forest, which is sunk between the two westernmost ridges of the Allegheny Mountains, about 90 minutes south of Pittsburgh. The area, branded the Laurel Highlands, once rivaled the Poconos as a Pennsylvania resort destination. Gilded Age plutocrats hunted fox and summered in these hills. Plenty of holidaymakers are still drawn in by the strenuous charms of spelunking, white-water rafting and biking the Great Allegheny Passage, a 150-mile rail trail that almost grazes Fallingwater.

Image
Fallingwater was built for E.J. Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store magnate, in the Laurel Highlands, which once rivaled the Poconos as a Pennsylvania resort destination for Gilded Age plutocrats. Credit...Rob Cardillo for The New York Times

But much of the local culture seems, at first blush, hardscrabble and uninviting. Fayette County, the home of Wright’s famous house, is one of the poorest in Pennsylvania, its rolling landscape littered with a backcountry potpourri of churches, crumbling barns, gun shops and fast-food restaurants. There are farms, but few farm stands (to say nothing of farm-to-table restaurants), and after driving for a few hungry hours you may start to wonder whose cow you have to milk to get a slice of local cheese around here.

This judgment is understandable, but it’s also superficial. The deeper you dig into the Laurel Highlands, the more treasure you uncover, and soon the path to Fallingwater becomes almost as interesting as the house itself.

For my wife, Yana, and me, that path begins in Latrobe, 40 miles north of Bear Run, on a hillside blanketed in bluegrass. Here, for 30 years, John and Sukey Jamison have been quietly raising some of the country’s finest lamb — delicate, herbaceous, very lean.

The Jamisons sell freshly butchered cuts out of the farm and host occasional dinners. She cooks, he regales guests with stories of all the foodie celebrities who have championed the farm, from Julia Child to the Falstaffian New York Times correspondent R. W. Apple Jr. Mr. Jamison says that local geography and about 50 inches of annual rainfall have conspired to make the Laurel Highlands something like “the Napa Valley of lamb.”

With his tortoiseshell glasses, suspenders and comically tousled brows, Mr. Jamison has something of the country squire about him. Loquacious and stout, he makes a charming pair with his wife, who’s reedlike and a bit shy.

Now in their 60s, the Jamisons are self-taught farmers (they both majored in English) who began selling lamb by mail-order in the 1980s, advertising in one-inch notices in the back of The New Yorker magazine.

They practiced sustainable farming techniques like rotational grazing — which helps regenerate the wild pastures that the lambs feed on — long before such things were hip. Grass-feeding is not only healthier for the animals and for the environment, it also lends the meat a kind of seasonal flavor. “Lamb tastes like what it eats,” said Mr. Jamison. In the spring, curly onion grass makes the meat a bit garlicky, while in the fall you can detect notes of wild clover and berries.

Today 200-acre Jamison Farm supplies restaurants like Blue Hill in New York and Alinea in Chicago. But the lamb is harder to find on local menus.

An exception is the Eastwood Inn, in Ligonier, a classic steakhouse encased in period charm, where Jamison lamb chops are grilled simply and served with a parade of anachronistic accompaniments: mint jelly, a jacket potato, a chilled iceberg wedge. This restaurant began its life in the 1880s as a stage coach stop, became a speakeasy during Prohibition (with a brothel next door) and retains a soupçon of secrecy: There’s no sign, you have to buzz to be let in.

The place was recently purchased by a young couple who live upstairs: he tends bar (often in a bow tie), she’s a historian down the road at Fort Ligonier, where you can see a pair of famous pistols that the Marquis de Lafayette gave to George Washington.

The Jamison lamb trail also takes us to nearby Greensburg, where we enjoy a scrumptious lamb burger (topped with Boursin and pickled beets) at the Supper Club, a restaurant nooked into the city’s Jacobean-revival Amtrak station. If you visit downtown Greensburg, take a peek inside the Westmoreland County Courthouse, whose Renaissance-style dome dominates the cityscape.

The original entrance is closed, so you have to enter this century-old granite building through an ugly postwar lobby annex. Once inside, the view changes radically: A marble double staircase spirals up to a ridiculously ornate central rotunda that’s smothered in gold leaf and arabesques, and you realize that, hidden inside this small, soporific city is a minor masterpiece of Beaux-Arts architecture.

Image
A lamb burger at the Supper Club in Greensburg.Credit...Rob Cardillo for The New York Times

We find similarly impressive vestiges of this region’s vanished wealth across the Laurel Highlands — from the Louis Comfort Tiffany stained-glass windows in the churches of Uniontown to the elite country club Rolling Rock, a 10,000-acre former Mellon estate in Ligonier, one of the last redoubts of the WASPy old-money society that Mr. Kaufmann tried so hard to penetrate.

Most extant cultural attractions are connected, in one way or another, to that steel and coal money. This is true of Greensburg’s Westmoreland Museum of American Art, which was founded by Mary Marchand Woods, the wife of Cyrus E. Woods, a powerful lawyer for the Mellon family who later served as a United States ambassador to Japan.

Opened in 1959, the Westmoreland unveiled a major renovation at the end of last year, adding a sleek new gallery building cantilevered à la Fallingwater. Inside the museum are minor works by a few big-name artists — Sargent, Cassatt, Winslow Homer — along with a fascinating collection of regional art. I can’t help but contrast the Stygian landscapes of industrial-age Pittsburgh (by Colin Campbell Cooper and others) with the paradisiacal nature scenes of the Laurel Highlands by George Hetzel. No wonder Mr. Kaufmann and other wealthy Pittsburghers spent their weekends in the country.

Touring that country by car is a thrill. The old roads, some of which were first cleared by now-extinct eastern woods buffalo, snake around hillsides, along streambeds and across century-old covered bridges. Autumn here is absurdly beautiful; at the end of the season, the leaves in the treetops turn almost purplish, like an expensive head of cauliflower, before falling away.

We needed caffeine before beginning the Frank Lloyd Wright component of our trip, so we stopped at Sand Hill Berries in Mount Pleasant, a working farm with a bakery and cafe. We drank our coffee and ate a slice of electric-red raspberry pie on a picnic table in a flower garden, where local couples sometimes get married.

There are three Wright homes clustered within miles of one another in the Laurel Highlands — all of which you can tour, although the Duncan House, in Acme, is the only one you can sleep in. The house is a modest, single-story “Usonian” style prefab, a democratic design that Wright hoped he could scale, making his organic architecture accessible to the masses.

Image
Raspberry pie at Sand Hill Berries in Mount Pleasant, a working farm with a bakery and cafe.Credit...Rob Cardillo for The New York Times

The house was actually built in a Chicago suburb in the 1950s but was taken apart piece by piece, carted 600 miles and then painstakingly reconstructed, in 2007, by Tom Papinchak, a local contractor. Mr. Papinchak and his wife, Heather, also own two nearby homes by a Wright disciple, Peter Berndtson, and have opened all of them up — under the name Polymath Park — for overnight stays and tours.

The homes are interesting for architecture buffs but I can’t recommend them unreservedly as rentals: the mix of shabby vintage furniture and second-rate modern appliances gives the whole project a slightly amateurish feel.

Like the Duncan house, Kentuck Knob in Stewart Township is Usonian in style but much richer: flagstone steps lead up to an L-shaped, dramatically horizontal house topped with a copper roof and decorated all around with red cypress dentil frieze. On the porch, a row of hexagonal open-air skylights frame tall trees and sky.

While Wright visited the property only once, after construction had begun, the house was purpose-built for its impressive surroundings, recessed into a 2,000-foot hill that offers a spectacular view of the Youghiogheny River gorge.

Wright designed custom furniture for both Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob: bookcases, wardrobes and my favorite piece — the giant Cherokee red wine kettle that swings into Fallingwater’s fireplace, to heat big batches of mulled wine over the hearth. Such furniture was, Wright said, “client-proof”: built into the house, it could not easily be undone or ruined by the dubious decorating impulses of his patrons. Nevertheless, I think it’s safe to say that both these houses were, if not improved, then enriched by their owners’ idiosyncratic additions.

This is particularly true at Kentuck Knob, where the current owner, the British baron Lord Palumbo, has brought in an array of exquisite, museum-quality furniture by the likes of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gustav Stickley, Carlo Bugatti and Wright himself.

Image
The view from Kentuck Knob.Credit...Rob Cardillo for The New York Times

As if that weren’t enough, in a meadow and along a wooded path beneath the house, Lord Palumbo has scattered a preponderance of modern sculpture (by Andy Goldsworthy, Sir Anthony Caro, Claes Oldenburg and others) along with a few British telephone boxes and a slice of the Berlin Wall. The fact that there’s so much to see — and that there are no crowds — makes the experience of visiting Kentuck Knob rival that of Fallingwater.

But of course you’ll go to Fallingwater. Its impact is undiminished by the countless photographs you’ve seen of it. The house’s effect on you accumulates over the course of the tour as you notice things like the small stairway in the living room, accessible via sliding glass panels, that reaches down to a point just above the stream. The stairs are almost cantilevered — they have no supports from below — and flow downward in a way that echoes the movement of the falls and the overall design of the house.

Before you dream of living here, know that ownership was not without its challenges — many of which came from the water’s proximity, and the resulting humidity. (Mr. Kaufmann nicknamed the house “Rising Mildew.”)

The concessions at Fallingwater are fine, but you’ll do better to drive 10 miles south and have a lunch at Bittersweet Cafe, a country store where everything from the creamy cucumber salad to the Pennsylvania Dutch apple pie is homemade. Bittersweet also has a little annex filled with an improbably great collection of antiques sourced from estate sales.

Still high on interior design, and noticing the cheap-as-chips prices, I bought most of the store, including a pair of Japanese teak salad servers that would not have looked out of place in Kentuck Knob’s kitchen and an Amish bentwood rocker that I later found, on 1stdibs.com, for 10 times the price.

Is it cocktail hour yet? Looking at all these weekend homes makes you want to join the party. The Summit Inn, a few minutes from Fallingwater in Farmington, is the place. Built in 1907, it’s one of America’s last great “porch hotels ” — a lovely category that is devoted to lazing about. Past guests have included Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.

Image
Kentuck Knob was recessed into a 2,000-foot hill that offers a spectacular view of the Youghiogheny River gorge.Credit...Rob Cardillo for The New York Times

While the hotel is a bit rumpled today, its patio roof is in pristine shape, and, importantly, full of white rocking chairs. A whiskey and Perrier paired with the astounding view of Chestnut Ridge somehow lets all that architecture sink into the soul.

Reservations are essential to tour the three Frank Lloyd Wright homes in the Laurel Highlands. For tickets to Fallingwater and the Duncan House at Polymath Park, visit Fallingwater.org.Kentuck Knob tickets: kentuckknob.com. To book an overnight stay (from $249 per night) at Polymath Park, go to polymathpark.com.

Bittersweet Cafe, 205 Farmington-Ohiopyle Road, Farmington; 724-329-4411,mybittersweetcafe.com. Minutes from Fallingwater, this adorable country store and antiques shop is a perfect lunch stop for architecture pilgrims.

The Eastwood Inn, 661 Old Lincoln Highway, Ligonier; 724-238-6454, theeastwoodinn.com. Once a speakeasy, this historic steakhouse mixes classic cocktails and retro entrees like Salisbury steak and lamb chops with mint jelly.

Jamison Farm, 171 Jamison Lane, Latrobe; 800-237-5262, jamisonfarm.com. This farm raises some of the country’s best grass-fed lamb and hosts occasional dinners and cooking classes (from $75 a person). Book far in advance; space is very limited.

The Supper Club, 101 Ehalt Street, Greensburg; 724-691-0536, supperclubgreensburg.com. This cavernous restaurant attracts locavores with a menu featuring western Pennsylvania’s best purveyors, including Jamison Farm.

The Inne at Watson’s Choice 234 Balsinger Road, Uniontown; 724-437-4999, watsonschoice.com.This newly renovated hotel is built around a 19th-century brick farmhouse and offers traditional guest rooms as well as rustic wooden cabins with kitchenettes (typically for extended stays). Rooms from $105.

Northview Inn, 111 North View Heights, New Florence; 724-235-9472, northviewinn.com. ThisB&B is a bit off the beaten path in a gut-renovated Gothic revival home that’s dripping with choice antiques. The rooms are plush and the comfy parlor contains a fireplace, a chess set and serve-yourself decanters full of port and brandy. Rooms from $75.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section TR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Wright’s Genius Met Its Match. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT