Frank Lloyd Wright

Ward W. Willits House, Highland Park, Illinois, circa 1901
Private Collection
Christie's New York, June 11, 1988, lot 112
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Grant Carpenter Mason, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age, New York, 1958, p. 115, fig. 80 (for a period photograph of the model in situ)

“I wouldn’t like to change so much the way we live, as what we live in, and how we live in it.”

Designed in 1901, the Ward W. Willits House in Highland Park, Illinois is one of the earliest and most iconic examples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style. Inspired by the ideals of the Arts & Crafts movement, Wright sought to establish a modern American architectural vocabulary rooted in the surrounding landscape of the Midwest. He strongly believed that structures should harmonize with their environments, as if they had grown organically from the ground below. This notion of unity and synthesis extended further to the interior furnishings, as each part of a commission related to the whole in order to achieve gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art.

The Willits House was the perfect embodiment of Wright’s principles. Constructed from a wood frame with a stucco finish, the residence follows a cruciform floor plan with four wings projecting from a central fireplace. Each wing is covered with a hipped roof and features broad overhanging eaves, which emphasize its horizontality and evoke the broad, flat expanses of Illinois. On the interior, this configuration also allowed for what Wright believed to be an ideal spatial organization for living, alternating between intimate rooms for conversation and open spaces for entertainment.

The present armchair is a handsome example of how Wright’s furniture designs integrated within each site-specific commission. Like the Willits House, the form is minimalist in its construction and does not rely on ornament to distinguish it. Instead, the geometry and simplicity of its lines speak for themselves, with elegantly tapered armrests, a broad top rail, and slender spindles along the sides and seatback. Spindles were a favored decorative element across Wright’s seating designs. In this case they serve to visually lighten the oak frame as the narrow slivers of positive and negative space they create impart the chair with great dynamism. 

Ward Willits lived in his home until his death in 1954, after which time the house was purchased by a new owner and the furniture dispersed. The seating from the house remains highly coveted, with other examples held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, High Museum of Art and more.