A rare chance to buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house Architecture

Kitchen of Fawcett House designed by an aging Frank Lloyd Wright in 1955 and completed in 1961, two years after his death. It's on the market for $2.7 million. Details: 5 bedrooms, 4.5 baths, 3,700 square feet on 80 acresFrank Lloyd Wright Fawcett House less Kitchen of Fawcett House designed by an aging Frank Lloyd Wright in 1955 and completed in 1961, two years after his death. It's on the market for $2.7 million. Details: 5 bedrooms, 4.5 baths, 3,700 square feet ... more Photo: Scott Mayoral Photo: Scott Mayoral Image 1 of / 12 Caption Close A rare chance to buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house 1 / 12 Back to Gallery

The southern edge of Los Banos (Merced County), where only dusty roads and distant silos interrupt the endless landscape of tilled Central Valley soil, seems an unlikely place to happen upon the work of America's architectural icon. But past the cattle feedlot and leaning hay barn, deep in a field where winter wheat and cantaloupe mark the seasons, sits a ranch house designed by an aging Frank Lloyd Wright.

It is the third-to-last California residence drawn by the master of suburban homes, and one of only two currently on the market.

Obscured from the road by a cluster of walnut trees, the cinderblock structure forms an angular, shallow U. The living room at the base looks onto the garden through a wall of windows and French doors. Twin wings swing open to 120 degrees, a row of bedrooms radiating outward on the north side, the kitchen and play room on the south, before giving way to a palm-shaded swimming pool.

The original owners, Randall "Buck" and Harriet Fawcett, met Wright while taking an architecture course at Stanford University, according to a memoir of the home by Henry Whiting II, an architectural writer and husband of the couple's daughter Lynn.

Buck Fawcett was a star college football player, drafted to play for the Chicago Bears in 1946. Instead, he returned to work the Los Banos farm that his father had homesteaded, after the patriarch became seriously ill with valley fever.

Less than a decade later, the couple, by then in their early 30s, sought out the world-famous architect to design their family home. The Fawcetts met with Wright in 1954 at Taliesin West, his Scottsdale, Ariz., studio, taking along pictures of the proposed site, Whiting wrote. Thumbing through them, Wright commented: "Not much beauty there."

Fawcett responded: "Actually, Mr. Wright, the Central Valley of California contains the most fertile agricultural land in the world, and you should consider it an honor to build a house there!"

It's impossible to know whether the architect, then 87 and still at the height of his fame, was miffed by the young man's cheekiness or impressed by his gumption. What is clear is that the designs, completed in 1955, honor the landscape that Fawcett had so passionately defended.

Wright was known to tell clients selecting home sites to go as far away from cities as they could - and then go 10 miles farther. That advice stands at sharp odds with modern planning, which stresses the environmental benefits of dense urban design. But in the Fawcett house, one of the few still as remote as it was the day Wright glimpsed the setting, one can understand what he had in mind, at least from an aesthetic point of view.

The elongated structure and the lines of the low-pitched roof, banded with a copper fascia, echo the flatness of the fields around it. The wings stretch out like open arms to the Coast Range in the distance. Where the sections of typical homes feel squared off and self contained, the obtuse angles, walls of windows, loggia and terrace open up the space, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior.

"He softened the whole effect of the place on that barren center of a valley by using the 120-degree angles," said William Storrer, author of "The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion." "It just seemed to be right for the space."

The centerpiece of the family room is a 6-foot-high, 12-foot-wide fireplace, a veritable cave where Randall Fawcett would tend massive walnut logs that burned for days. Built-in mahogany cabinetry and furniture accent corners and spaces throughout the home.

The concrete floor slab is scribed with perfect equilateral triangles, whose angles reappear in fixtures throughout, including cut-out wood screens, lighting fixtures and the patterned fascia. They're similar enough to provide a sense of continuity and theme, but sufficiently varied to provide pleasant surprises from one room to the next.

"Every aspect of the design of the house fits within the architectural language that Frank Lloyd Wright set up," Whiting said.

Storrer and other observers say the building, while not among Wright's best known, is an articulate expression of his design philosophy at the latter stage of his career. He was attempting to create a uniquely North American architectural lexicon, free from classical and European influences, that also eliminated unnecessary elements to ensure homes were within reach of the middle (or at least upper-middle) class.

"It's kind of the ultimate statement of his innovative idea of creating what he called a purely American-style architecture," said Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago. "This one is all angles and glass and concrete blocks. At the time, it was clearly an expression of ultra-modern design."

Construction was completed in 1961, two years after Wright's death. Buck Fawcett, the young man who sought out Wright a half century ago and routinely proclaimed his home the architect's best, died in 2006, more than a decade after Harriet.

The couple's two daughters, who live in other parts of the country, decided to sell the house and to find a buyer who could care for it properly. Lynn Fawcett Whiting and her husband already own and reside in a Frank Lloyd Wright artist studio near the banks of the Snake River in Idaho, and are only too aware of the special requirements involved.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy generally prefers that the architect's homes end up in private hands, Scherubel said. Short of a hefty endowment, institutions typically don't have the resources to properly maintain them.

An individual who lives in the home and sought it out for its historical value, on the other hand, has all the necessary motivation to perform upkeep in a way that respects the intrinsic character. The price tag alone - $2.7 million for a roughly 3,700-square-foot home in Los Banos - is likely to eliminate anyone who isn't a full-fledged architecture buff.

"It's not like a normal house," Henry Whiting said. "It requires a lot of love and maintenance. We just want to see it get to somebody who really loves it, and I know that that's what Mr. Fawcett wanted."