The Pope-Leighey House.
Finding affordable housing in the Washington region is a challenge today, but it’s not a new challenge. The Pope-Leighey House at Woodlawn, designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, is a unique example of 1940s, intentionally designed affordable living.
In 1939, journalist Loren Pope, a 28-year-old copy editor at the now-defunct Washington Evening Star newspaper, was earning $50 a week and wanted to build a modest house on his Falls Church lot. Pope was fascinated with Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect who was designing houses that today would cost around $650,000, far out of Pope’s price range.
Pope and his wife Charlotte envisioned spending $5,500, equal to about $86,000 today. In 1936 Wright had written, “The house of moderate cost is not only America’s major architectural problem but the problem most difficult for her major architects.”
So Lauren sent Wright a six-page letter with an “ask”: “There are certain things a man wants during life, and, of life. Material things and things of the spirit. It is for a house created by you. I feel that you are the great creative force of our time. Will you create a house for us? Will you?”
In 15 days, Wright responded, “Of course. I’m ready to give you a house.”
Lauren and Charlotte Pope ended up paying $7,000, including the furniture and the architect’s fee. “My last resort,” Pope recounted later in an interview with the National Building Museum, “was the Evening Star, which financed homes for its employees. The Star offered to lend me $5,700, to be taken out of my pay at $12 a week.”
The 1,200 square foot house, built in 1940 and 1941 on their 1.3-acre lot and now located at Woodlawn, 10 miles south of the City of Alexandria, is an example of Wright’s 100 or so Usonian houses built between 1936 and 1959. (Wright died in 1959.) It is one of only three Wright-designed houses in the Commonwealth. These homes were designed to be efficient, functional and affordable for middle-income people. Usonian is thought to mean “the United States of North America.”
The Usonian House
“The Usonian house was intended to provide a radically rethought, partially shop-built, inexpensive yet sublime dwelling for the middle-income American family. Wright wanted to make these houses affordable to all who owned land by maximizing the use of readily available, local building materials,” wrote Steven M. Reiss in his 2014 book, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House.”
The horizontal line was Wright’s recurring architectural theme for this house: A flat, cantilevered roof, a horizontal siding pattern and windows and doors clustered in horizontal bands. Even screw heads were often “turned to be horizontal,” wrote Reiss.
From the carport, visitors take a few steps down through an entryway to an L-shaped, one-story house and into an open combined library and living room. The room has a small table for meals or games and high, clear windows between wood cutouts that fill the room with light. Light fixtures are recessed.
Wright “made the 1,000- to 2,000-square-foot houses space-efficient by compressing bedrooms and corridors and eliminating the separate dining room in favor of large combined living and dining areas . . .,” wrote Reiss. The floors are concrete.
Since servants were not needed, the kitchen is small. Wright wanted the person working in the kitchen to be visible, available to the family. To maximize natural light, the cabinets open away from the window. Accordion doors save space and can be closed for entertaining.
There are two cozy bedrooms off a narrow hall and one bathroom. The natural, honey-colored red cypress, wood walls, inside and outside, eliminate the need for paint or plaster. Pope wrote in 1948, “There is no paint to be cleaned or to be done over every three or four years, at $500 or more per doing. There is no plaster – which means no mess, no future dust storms while that is being repaired or done over.”
To make the rooms feel bigger, Wright also designed much of the house’s furniture on a slightly smaller scale and integrated the furniture into the home’s design, to make it blend in. He designed the beds to be low and with no box springs. The unusually high doorknobs are his form of childproofing.
The furnace was in a small utility room, eliminating the need for a basement and a carport protected cars. Wright claimed he invented the term “carport.” The red concrete floor doubled as the home’s radiant heater “by virtue of the hot water pipes underneath,” Reiss wrote.
Wright felt that attics and garages encouraged materialism so the house has minimal storage space. He believed that “Americans had too much clutter,” said Amanda Roper, Woodlawn’s senior manager of Public Programs and Interpretation.
Wright sought to integrate the Usonian houses with their natural settings. Doors with windows lead to an outside patio, connecting the indoors with the outdoors.
The Pope-Leighey house was considered to be small by many then, but its design makes it feel larger than it is. It is “deceptively complex in design,” wrote Reiss.
Moved Twice
After the Popes’ son Ned died in a tragic drowning accident, they had two more children, a boy and a girl. Needing more room for their family, they decided to sell the home and move to Loudoun County. On Nov. 7, 1946, the Popes placed an ad in the Evening Star. “FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT house of cypress, plate glass and brick: radiant heat; three bedrooms, two terraces; mostly furnished; one and one-third acres landscaped near house, rest in woods; small stream; $17,000.”
Marjorie and Robert Leighey purchased the house from the Popes in 1947.
In the early 1960s, the Virginia Department of Transportation was planning a highway known as Interstate 66 which would go straight through the house’s living room. Marjorie, a widowed teacher who was then living in the house, issued a public plea to preserve it, even meeting with then-U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and other officials on a Saturday in her home. In 1964, Leighey donated the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Trust moved the house that year to Woodlawn, near Mount Vernon. Woodlawn is the colonial estate of Lawrence Lewis, George Washington’s nephew.
The property was a treed lot similar to the Falls Church property for which it was designed. The house was reassembled by the same carpenter, Harold Rickert, who built the house. After returning from a five-year stay in Japan, Leighey returned and lived in the house until her death in 1983.
Preservationists had to dismantle and reassemble it a second time in 1996 because of unstable soils and cracks in the base so they moved it 30 feet uphill to more solid ground.
Impresses Visitors
Richard van Tiggele, an architect from the Netherlands, was awed by the house when he visited in April. “I’d never heard of this house during my studies in the Technical University in Delft, nor the years after. I had no illusions or idea what to expect, so I went there with a non-judgmental approach,” he said.
“But what I saw and heard intrigued me. The house was meant to be an example for affordable living for the average American, not a big house, though bigger than any average house in the Netherlands, but with a splendid intelligent and spatial scheme.
“A huge, low cantilever provides the entrance. Like always, in Wright’s houses, the ceiling is low to allow the visitor the feeling of height and light as they move forward in the house. In fact, the rooms are part of one continuous space, divided by walls and steps. Beautiful is the color of the wooden walls that get gray over the years and thus become in total harmony with the surrounding nature. What impressed me the most were the small eaves in combination with the huge cantilevers.”
The Pope-Leighey House today looks much as it did when the Popes lived in it. “To most observers, it appears frozen in time, back to those first days in March 1941 when Charlotte, Loren and Ned first moved in,” wrote Reiss.
When Loren Pope passed away in 2008 at age 98, his memorial service was held at the Pope-Leighey House. An apartment building in Falls Church, Loren, takes its name from him.
“Every home should be as unique as the people living in it,” Wright maintained. This one is.
The Pope-Leighey House is the only Frank Lloyd Wright house in Virginia, Washington, D. C., and Maryland open to the public. Visit www.woodlawnpopeleighey.org for information.
Events
Wright at Twilight House Tours
Aug. 16, Sept. 20, 6:30 p.m. – 9 p.m./$25 per person
Fairy House Festival
Oct. 5, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Fall Open House
Nov. 2
Winter Holidays
In December, evening tours will be scheduled to see the home decorated for a mid-century holiday.
For more information, visit:
