In honor of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th birthday, PlansMatter, an agency through which architecture aficionados (Yes! That’s us!) can rent the architect-designed homes of their dreams, is promoting stays at the architect’s Kinney House in Lancaster, WI. “Stay here to immerse yourself in Wright’s remarkable ‘diamond module’ plan, which results in unique rooms that seem to unfold before you,” founders Scott Muellner and Connie Lindor enthused in a recent press release. “As [an] example of Wright’s non-rectilinear Usonian vocabulary, the Kinney House provides you with a rare opportunity to experience firsthand what it would be like to live in Wright’s ‘democratic’ architecture.”
Since we first wrote about PlansMatter last year, however, the group has added 18 more properties from around the world to its drool-worthy, eclectic mix of house rentals. One is Bruno Taut’s home in Berlin. On the PlansMatter blog, the founders write that this property has been restored by Katrin Lesser (a landscape architect) and Ben Buschfeld (a graphic designer) as a museum but with “ ‘a groundbreaking new concept reflecting that architecture and design needs to be used.’ We couldn’t agree more! They believe that ‘you can’t really evaluate a piece of design just by looking at it’ and have restored Taut’s home not just to be looked at, but lived in.”
The Weaving House in Lakeland, FL, is another new favorite of Muellner and Lindor. A mid-century minimalist masterpiece with a down-to-earth color palette, and gorgeous detailing and furnishings, the home was built in 1957 by Mark Hampton, “a leading figure in the Sarasota School—a group of post-war architects who designed modernist buildings on Florida’s West Coast,” according to the website. “The low slung horizontal silhouette was constructed of steel beams and open plan spaces that incorporate the natural environment with walls of glass—including a fully glazed wall at the rear with screens for privacy.”
Other new properties include Casa 1015 in Porto, Portugal, which epitomizes Iberian rustic simplicity; four holiday houses masquerading as pure yet luxurious boxes at Aufberg 1110 and 1113 in Salzburg, Austria; and two houses on the Isle of Moen, Denmark—Birkedal, an exquisite and fanciful house filled with curved spaces, and Black + Bright, which sits serenely in a meadow. PlansMatter has also added multiple rentals in Tokamachi, Japan that are hybrids of architecture and art: House of Light by the light sculptor James Turrell; Dream House, built as an art installation by performance artist Marina Abramovic; Australia House, built by Andrew Burns Architects as an installation for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale; and Shedding House, another art installation designed by Junichi Kurakake and volunteers of Nihon University College of Art Sculpture Course.
Closer to home and also designed by Wright are the Seth Peterson Cottage in Mirror Lake and Still Bend in Two Rivers, both in Wisconsin, for those on a travel budget but still in need of a celebratory fix.
By Camille LeFevre
