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Living in a Frank Lloyd Wright home is not always a low-cost pursuit. But if you’re looking in this market, it doesn’t get more affordable than the McCartney House, a 1950 Usonian home in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Priced at $790,000, it is currently the least expensive home on the market designed by Wright, according to Realtor. “The home, like many in the area, fell into a state of disrepair,” Fred Taber, one of the listing, tells AD over email. (Victoria Krause Schutte is the co-lister.) The current owners, who bought the home in in 2021, took great care to fix it up and are now ready to pass the torch to the next steward.
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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.
“We were overwhelmed to be in the presence of a great man, and to be given such a gift,” Helen wrote. The couple never questioned the practicality of such a unique home either, she added. “Wright was the master, and we trusted him implicitly.” Included in the blueprints were also furniture designs, some of which are still in the house.
While the home is the most affordable Wright design currently for sale, $790,000 is not cheap. It’s significantly higher than the average price of a home in the United States ($417,700) and more than three times more expensive than the typical home in Kalamazoo ($219,568). However, Taber told Realtor that its price accurately reflects the architect, size, and condition of the home.
According to Taber, though the home is overall in a good condition, there are also opportunities for new owners to add even more value. “If one were to stain the interior block it would be more aesthetically pleasing,” he says. Salt can form on the concrete in a process known as efflorescence, which creates a white hue on the surface. “Some people instantly think of water issues, but that is not the case. The original owners used to go over the blocks with acetone which removes it,” he explains.
The current owners are from Texas and aren’t able to visit as often as they’d like. Taber says he imagines the next steward may come from a nearby city such as Chicago or Detroit but is not ruling out a local buyer. Nonetheless, whoever buys it next is in for an adventure, according to Helen. For her, living in the Wright home was nothing short of life-changing. “The house has indeed made a profound difference in our lives,” she wrote in her book. Her family existed in harmony with nature, and all of their children chose careers based on art and design. “For me, living in the house has become romance, adventure, and challenge. And add the bird-calling and pecking on our windows, and I think you will understand why our family has lived here for 50 years, in gratitude to Frank Lloyd Wright.”
