How to Tour Frank Lloyd Wright's Pope-Leighey House

The only Frank Lloyd Wright building in the greater Washington, D.C. area is a textbook example of the small, inexpensive houses he spent much of the later part of his career designing. The Pope-Leighey house is one of Wright's "Usonian" designs (the name is taken from the United States of America) and consists of only five rooms spread over 1,200 square feet, but it is a masterful expression of space and materials.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Wright built the house for Loren Pope of Falls Church, Virgina in 1940. The house and Wright-designed furniture cost $7,000. The Pope family lived there until 1946, when they sold it to Robert and Marjorie Leighey. In the early 1960s, Mrs. Leighey, now a widow, learned that her home was in the way of a planned highway expansion and she worked out a deal with the National Trust to have the house moved, rebuilt and restored. She would retain the right to lifetime occupancy.
   
   The house was moved to Alexandria, Virginia, to the grounds of Woodlawn, the home of Martha Washington's granddaughter, Nelly Custis Lewis. The house had to be relocated and reconstructed yet again in 1995 because of the condition of ground and foundation.

2. The house was built of horizontal board and batten, with the kitchen/utility areas, fireplace and certain load-bearing walls built of brick. The floors were of concrete, with hot water pipes under them, creating what Wright called "radiant heat." The roof is flat, with broad, protecting and projecting eaves.
   
   Like many Usonians, the Pope-Leighey turns its back on passers-by, to give the family more privacy. The entrance is under a carport (a Wright invention) and goes into what is, for Wright, a fairly good-sized foyer. To the right is a private study or "sanctum." To the left a gallery leads to a bathroom and two bedrooms which, though small, have large windows.

3. If you go straight ahead from the foyer it takes you down some steps into the main part of the house. To the left are cabinets; to the right the small-but-efficient kitchen or "workspace" with attached utility room. Beyond all this is the living room: fireplace to one side, sunny dining alcove to another, two rows of built-in seating, a cozy book nook, tall casement windows and clerestories.
   
   Wright was above all a great manipulator of space, and he loved playing the same tricks over and over, bringing people from darkness into light, from low, confining spaces, into high, airy ones. Other architects may have tried the same thing with major public buildings, but only Wright would have pulled it off in a small house.