The architect?s early interior work helped develop his idea for homes as total works of art Ever the confident architect, it?s not surprising that Frank Lloyd Wright thought he knew better when it came to interior furnishings.
As Wright?s history of custom furniture and built-ins?seating and storage ?built into? the walls of his buildings? suggest, he felt his design schemes would be marred by cheap, mismatched commercial pieces. To create total works of art, artists needed total control (which Wright, whom would constantly spend entire Sundays afternoons rearranging the living room, according to one of his sons, freely exercised).
?The most truly satisfactory apartments are those in which most or all of the furniture is built in as part of the original scheme considering the whole as an integral unit,? he wrote in 1894. As a young architect working out of offices in downtown Chicago, fresh from his stint with Louis Sullivan?s firm, Wright was already thinking about buildings as total works of art, where every element from the exterior shell to the interior was connected. Throughout his career, his furniture design was inexorably linked with his greater philosophies about design and architecture: His archives would eventually contain more than 300 sketches of different chair designs.

Courtesy of Frank Lloyd Wright Trust. Photographer: James Caulfield
Living room of Frank Lloyd Wright?s home in Oak Park

That belief steered him toward furnit...