Lots of mid mod lovers are also big Frank Lloyd Wright fans. And why wouldn’t you be? In the last podcast episode we explored how Wright’s Prairie School and later Usonian homes are cool aunts and uncles to modest mid-century ranch houses.
As you plan your ranch remodel, you can absolutely dip into Wright design ideas. Your house is actually already full of them!
A description of a Usonian home sounds a lot like the description of a mid-century ranch.
To list a few:
- it has deep overhanging eaves that spread out horizontally across the lot on one level, or possibly a split level responding to a sloped site.
- there are elements of local cream or red brick, or a local limestone as a decorative detail.
- the hearth features masonry seen on the exterior.
- more private to the front and more open to the back yard.
- interior finishes and built ins are made of plywood and simple pine.
- built ins in the kitchen and bedrooms remove the need for closets.
Point by point they sound pretty similar, don’t they!?
So how should you go about ADDING details to your remodel that make it feel more “Wright”?
First and foremost, focus on materiality and arrangement.
Wright’s design philosophy prioritized simplicity and honesty of materials. Which, to him, meant drawing inspiration from the surrounding environment. A house feels like a Wright design wehen the materials echo the landscape. You should choose natural materials like stone, brick, and plaster.
Here are a few style sheets we’ve prepared for past clients who wanted to up the “wright quotient” in their mcm homes!
Wright worked in regions with low, rolling landscapes and wide horizons. Emphasizing horizontal lines and minimalist details will evoke the essence of Wright’s architecture.
Color should also reflect the surroundings – earthy yellows and greens of the prairie, mineral shades of orange, and deep woody browns.
And of course, Wright’s signature color – what I call Usonian red. This bold hue, often associated with barns and farm buildings, adds a striking accent to mid-century homes and pays homage to Wright’s design legacy.
Read more about that right here.
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- How to make material choices for a Wright-infused remodel.
- Which colors to choose to shout about your combined love of mid mod and Prairie style.
- The simple shape secrets to get the Wright feel.
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Resources
- Grab my Mid-Century house color carousel!
- Learn the essential elements of my master plan process at my new (FREE) workshop! Speedy Strategies to Plan a Remodel You’ll Love (in the time you have) happens Thursday May 9th @ 2pm. There’s still time to register here!
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Today we’ve got part two of Frank Lloyd Wright designs and your mid-century home. Last week we talked about why it’s a fine idea to blend design inspiration you take from books about Wright buildings he designed you visited in person and the work of his many talented apprentices and disciples.
This week we get into the how, what design levers you can pull what inspiration you should seek, what materials you should choose if you want to make your mid-century ranch a little more Frank Lloyd Wright inspired. Let’s talk about prairie and mid mod, part two. Hey there, welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life and make a little more Frank Lloyd Wright.
I’m your host Della Hansmann architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, you’re listening to Episode 1705.
Okay, I’m going to do this week’s pep talk right up here at the top of the episode because it’s also an invitation for you to join me for a little experiment I’m doing later today. I’ll get to that in a moment. But here is the core concept I want you to take away from this week’s pep talk. Good design processes don’t necessarily have to take a very long amount of time.
One of the main reasons so many people skip entirely over the idea of working with a designer, or even doing any design thinking themselves before they pick up the phone and call in a contractor to begin whatever work needs to happen on their house is that they think they don’t have enough time. You might think this too. Particularly if you find yourself in a situation that has a bit of built in urgency.
Sometimes you’re coming up on a move, and you need to make alterations to a house to fit your life before you can move in time can be extremely short in that case, or when you’re dealing with an unexpected maintenance failure. If the toilet has just developed a leak that has prompted you to kick into gear on the bathroom update you’ve been thinking about and talking about for years, or one of these act of God situations a storm dropped an oak branch on your house and now you need a new roof.
What color should it be? Is this the time to do something about the gutters or shingles? Maybe a skylight. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t have time for any of those things. You’re working in an emergency. I think this is a false narrative. No, I’m not saying your situation isn’t urgent, and that you don’t need to make decisions quickly. Of course you do.
But I think the idea that you do not have time to do any design thinking is not only harmful to the ultimate outcome of your design but may actively be slowing you down along the way. We have a sort of mythology, that design or any sort of art means waiting for the spirit to move you loving crafted details, or something could be only done by certain people with certain talents and training.
And yes, sometimes the spirit of inspiration does strike more time spent crafting careful details is usually helpful to the outcome. And talent and training both contribute to the smoothness of the design process or any creative endeavor. But anyone can use design thinking tools to make their lives better, you can. And you should follow the processes of design thinking whenever you need to make a permanent, expensive change to the way your home works.
Pausing taking a breath and asking yourself even just a few essential questions before you pick up the phone to call a contractor or a supplier before you schedule the work or before you pick up a crowbar and begin on preliminary demolition will not only result in a better outcome overall, save you money along the way. But it will result in a faster process of design decisions and execution from start to finish.
Why? Because you won’t be shooting from the hip the whole time. And I know I get it. Emergency remodeling processes can feel like like you are up against a crowd at the okay corral. But you’re not you do have time to pause, you do have time to think about the direction you want to head in and set yourself up for success. So that’s the pep talk. I said also that I was going to invite you to an experiment.
And that experiment is that today at 2pm Central time that’s in the middle of the afternoon, I am giving a 30 minute workshop live on the strategies to speed plan, any mid-century Update, I’m going to talk you through the process of how you could plan a great remodel for your home. Whether we’re talking about one small project like a bathroom, or the entire house, if you needed to overhaul it quickly before you move in just 30 days, you could plan this out between making an offer and closing.
I’m going to describe what you need to do in those 30 days that process in just 30 minutes. And I’m going to do it live today at 2pm. Are you going to be there? I would love it if you were as always I will stick around like I do for every live and answer questions as long beyond the 30 minutes as necessary to cover everything that comes up for anyone who happens to be there live.
And if you’re listening to this podcast episode, not on Thursday, May 16. And it’s too late for you to show up live, then I hope you’ll check out the workshop replay. I’m predicting right now. It’s going to be a blast.
And it’s certainly going to be chock full of news you can use whether the next project for you that’s on your mind right now is large or small. By the way, even if you don’t have an emergency, an insurance event, or you’re not tearing on the verge of moving into a new house. You might also find this planning workshop useful. The concept of planning a remodel in just 30 days. If you’ve been Putting off your remodel, you might technically have plenty of time to get started, but you’re short on free time.
So you’ve just been procrastinating the beginning of any kind of a project, or any planning at all, because you don’t know where to begin and you don’t have enough hours in the day to do all the things you must do already, you will find that these speed strategies are particularly helpful to kickstart a project, a big one or a small one.
And getting yourself moving in the direction of the home you wish you could live in every day is my goal, you can have that. So sign up to show up live or to get the replay and the link at mid mod dash midwest.com/workshop. That’ll be your free resource for the day two because this workshop is absolutely free. So let’s see, what’s my last order of business? Oh, show notes per usual can be found at midmod- midwest.com/1705.
You’ll get the transcript of this episode plus some lovely images of Frank Lloyd Wright style style guide sheets that you might want to copy. Let’s say get inspired by if you want to enhance the prairie style, the Usonian credibility or the organic modernism of your mid-century home. Let’s get into it. To recap from last week, the question was, can I like Prairie School and my mid-century ranch house at the same time? And the answer is Sure you can.
We just can’t discount the effect of homegrown hero Frank Lloyd Wright on the design of Midwestern mid-century homes in particular, but also frankly, his influence on housing ideology across the whole country. At the time that ranch houses were being invented in California, and the mass production of Levitt cottages for the masses was kicking off on the East Coast.
Wright was a well-established architectural hero who had made a big impression on the American vernacular house. He had dealt and designed for the masses himself in the Great Depression, as some of his more expensive projects dried up and he was at kind of a stagnant period of his career. He met the young couple who were looking to build an affordable house the Jacobs’s and they asked him for a $5,000 about an $80,000 Today house that he built for them.
Usonian one is a single story building with a low flat roof that overlaps several levels and deep extending eaves. It has a modest asymmetrical street front connects to the street with a carport in this case, along the side of the house, making the rest of the house feel even longer and wider in its form. The back of the house is lined with Windows making a strong connection between the inside and outside, and the living and dining room are connected to each other and close to the small utilitarian kitchen, whereas the bedrooms are separated off from the open spaces in their own hallway.
This sounds a lot like a ranch and that is not a coincidence. Later in his career, Frank Lloyd Wright went on to design more than 100 Usonian houses around the country. And here in Madison, we see his influence not just on the homes and churches he specifically designed, but also in the work of his Taliesin apprentices and the work of all the contractors who work with Wright and his apprentices and then went on to adapt his ideas into their own projects.
So I would argue that certainly any house in Madison any house in the Midwest and I would think even to a certain extent any ranch house owes a little bit of a designed DNA to Frank Lloyd Wright. But if you really want to emphasize that connection, if you want to make some design moves to turn up the volume on any Usonian or Wrightian hand quality of your home, then you’re going to be thinking along two related lines.
One of them is materiality, the things you attach to the house itself, and the other is the arrangement that you make of those materials over his whole career. And it has Usonian buildings, in particular, Wright, use a relatively narrow palette of materials, although it was specifically influenced by the place where he worked. He had an interest all his life and things that were locally inspired and sourced. And he appreciated that honest approach, that architectural sense of materiality, referencing what it was doing.
Honesty of materials, when translated out of architectural jargon means he liked things to look like what they were. Now Wright was originally trained in the Louis Sullivan esque style that is he actually worked for Louis Sullivan in Chicago. And that style was a relatively ornate prototype of modernism. It came out of the school of thought of the Ecole de beaux arts and France, which had a more ornamented, elaborated use of plaster work decorated frescoes and murals inside of spaces, freezes outside of buildings.
But Sullivan style was about more than aesthetics. He firmly believed that form followed function that was his direct quote, that’s where we get that from Louis Sullivan. And so the building’s components should look like what they were. This phrase became the motto of modern architecture, with its focus on steel and glass boxes that expose their new building material, steel and glass to the world. But Wright took that idea in a different direction. As he came into his own, he simplified his material language and his patterns.
So his primary school buildings have a lot of stained glass and some layered bold wood molding around every door and window but by the time he was working in his Usonian era, he was both by preference and out of practicality cost becoming very simple enough shape choice says to another name that Wright gave his own design philosophy was organic architecture. Now, when he says organic architecture, he’s not talking about pesticide free fruit from the farmer’s market. He means a design that is inspired by the environment around it. His prairie style homes were suited to the wide open spaces at the Illinois plains.
His Wisconsin compound at Taliesin mimics the curving shape of the rolling hills around spring green, tucking a series of smaller spaces under a connected falling roofline that set just under the brow of the hill, falling water, arguably his most famous home is that over a waterfall, and picked up the feeling of big stone blocks, sliding or slipping down a sloped site.
He first used this term organic architecture as early as 1908. It was his answer to the international modern style that was emerging around the same time. And he didn’t want to say it was still in glass, he wanted to look at and listen to the site, the topology, the material language of the building, and then build something with those materials to reflect that site. So interestingly, we find ourselves right back in the same conversation I was having with Jim Drzewiecki of ginkgo design two weeks ago, you can’t design a yard irrespective of microclimate.
And while that is more obvious on one level, I mean, you can try to create a desert garden in the Midwest, but it will not flourish. And you can try to put enough water into the desert to create a Midwestern yard in the desert. And it’s going to be environmentally unfriendly and still struggled to thrive. That is most, that’s a more obvious problem. But it’s also problematic to try to build the wrong style of house and use the wrong materials in the wrong environment.
So to flip that on its head and take our advice from Wright. The place where you cite home should show up in the material and the style generally of that home. That’s why the designs he did in the American Southwest pick up the more desert oriented materials, Adobe sometimes concrete block, whereas his Midwestern Usonian homes are built from brick, stone and plaster. And they emphasize the wide open spaces of Midwest around them.
So one of the things we can look for in Wright’s buildings is that they are going to try to use materials to show exactly what they are. That’s the honesty of materials and that they are going to, in most cases emphasize that low landscape hugging profile, they might be built into a hill if there’s a hill on the site, or they might be built very long, low and wide if there is not. He’s building out a very simple idea.
So while his earlier homes have very elaborated trim, by the time we get to his Usonian period, we’ve got doors with one simple board wrapping around for our door jamb and door trim, doors and built ins are built from plywood and the edges of the laminated layers of the ply are left exposed. Minimalist windows for Wright were just sheets of glass that had a simple wooden frames and, in some cases, raw glass corners coming together with no wood in between them to form an apparently invisible corner that disappeared into the landscape view beyond.
Now just because his homes were getting simpler didn’t mean he wasn’t interested in the details, because Wright layered together a series of horizontal lines blocks of materials that offset each other. When he used brick, he often went so far as to instruct the Masons to rake the mortar more deeply in the horizontal grooves than the vertical ones so that your eye would catch on horizontal lines. He specified horizontal siding. If I’m thinking about the Jacobs house, Usonian one, he used a sort of reverse board and batten detail with wider boards sitting in front of skinnier battens all running horizontally. The battens which sit in the back are slightly darker.
To this day, I can’t tell whether the material choices a different stain color or just the natural result of differential weathering because they aren’t in the same plane with each other. But it emphasizes those big wide horizontal lines so your eye runs back and forth. The narrow batten pieces run right across the only front facing eye level window at the entry, which is a set of four vertical square block four square blocks set vertically, such that they’re interrupted only by the battens, and they appear to emerge seamlessly from the siding pattern rather than interrupting it.
So long story short, if you’re trying to make your house more, Wright, you’re going to want to look for places to lean into the details. But you don’t necessarily need to be talking about expensive materials. Wright consistently looked for ways to cut costs on material and spend a little bit more of that effort on good design planning and then well executed craft. He wanted to use really simple materials and make them seem more effective by adding detail and design.
Another example that pops to mind that’s here in Madison is one of a pair of houses that he collaborated to design with builder martial Erdman. These were meant to be prefab houses that could be mass produced and built all over the Midwest, but in fact only a few were ever executed. But the prefab house number one that he designed with Erdman is arranged with horizontally installed Mesa night siding just basically sheets of glorified press ordered, and then it’s decorated with long batten strips in front of it.
So it’s a much more simple and inexpensive craft detail than on Jacob’s one. But it gives that long horizontal sense with a very simple to install material that still does the job. It’s just panel siding, which is an idea that we actually use now in Hardy or LP SmartSide. We often see panels that are disguised as board and Batten, usually mounted vertically, but the same idea is being used and it came from right.
That said, while the materials that we think of for Frank Lloyd Wright, I use Tony inspired homes aren’t necessarily fancy, luxurious or expensive. They are pretty specific. If I have a client on a mid-century masterplan project, who tells me they adore Frank Lloyd Wright. They recently toured a Usonian house on a trip to California or New York, or they send me pictures of inspiration details they love and they immediately strike me as writing and then I know that we’re going to have certain materials and colors in play and others not.
I know that there’s not going to be a lot of 60s color pop or pop culture art in this house, it’s going to instead be focusing on a lot of natural woodwork, one or two stain colors that are mid to dark and range rather than blonde. It’s what work is not going to be necessarily complex, but it’s going to be elegant in its simplicity.
White elements like walls or plaster will probably tend towards the creamy tones rather than paper white and will be leaning into someplace where we can add brick, stone or a terracotta for an accent material. If there’s tile, it’s going to be white or terracotta.
In all likelihood, we’ll probably propose simple stainless appliances in the kitchen again, minimalism is going to be our goal for modern appliances. And if they’ve told us a little Prairie School, we might lean into something a little bit more vintage oriented, we might go to an oil rubbed bronze for the standard metal that appears throughout the house.
But we’re going to lean into natural woodwork, terracotta, red stained concrete, red brick, limestone, natural wood cream colored plaster, then we’re going to use those materials and orient them in wide spread out horizontal lines, we’re going to look for anywhere can we can create horizontal patterning throughout the house, it might be with a piece of picture rail that expands across we’re going to look for places where we can align the tops of windows and doors with built ends with woodwork.
These are details I might choose for any house that isn’t inspired by Wright. But I’ll just be looking to tie together as many small details as possible to give it a sense of purpose and meaning. Now, if you’re looking for some ideas of material palettes that are going to help your house tip more writing, you might want to go check out the show notes page because I’ll include a couple of links to style sheets, we’ve put together for past masterplan projects that show the combinations of materials that we think lend that client the right amount of writing and specificity that they’re looking for.
Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t also talk about color. I already mentioned that when I’m looking at White in a house that’s going to be Usonian influenced, I’m not going for a harsh paper White, I’m looking for something creamy. There’s one other power color that I haven’t mentioned yet. And that is Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite color, what he would have called Cherokee red and what I like to refer to as Usonian red.
Now, long before the millennial mid mod craze for gray painted houses with pop color doors or black houses if you want to go all in hip homeowners of the 1940s 50s and 60s chose to say I’m in with the mid-century modern architecture in crowd by using a particular shade of dark brick red. So if you’re looking for a bold mid-century color that also goes completely well with any classic, early vintage choices. Cherokee red Usonian red is the signature color of the early mid-century period.
This color defied the twee, soft spoken powder blue and baby pink color schemes of the earlier earliest mid-century postwar traditional homes. It made its mark before the 60s Mod drive towards bright orange flowers and avocado appliances. This Usonian read this dark brick red barn red, if you will, with the color choice especially among the mid-century architects who trained with Frank Lloyd Wright at his both of his Taliesin schools.
Red catches your eye, and I started making a collection of my favorite Usonian red houses shining out like beacons around the Madison area shortly after I moved back here. Back in the days when I was less chained to my desk, I spent a bunch of time driving around and making collections of mid-century neighborhoods. I still do this when I have time, but I have less time for it. But still, I could probably identify by memory where all my favorite, boldest architecturally interesting houses are and nine times out of 10. If those houses aren’t dark, original wood stain Brown, they are Usonian red.
Once you start looking out for these, you will also see them everywhere. And that’s partly because red houses grab the eye. Our ancient pattern seeking back brain shouts red berries, get over there and eat those delicious calories so you can survive till tomorrow. And my modern designers brain thinks, cool. I shall walk over there and take a picture of that with my iPhone. Here’s where I’m actually going to reach out to you, my dear listener, and ask if this is true in your space because it’s certainly true and Madison and I think, as we follow Wright’s influence to the east coast.
It’s also true you’ll just see a host of these barn red, Usonian red I’ll use the word Cherokee red a couple of times in this episode homes and we find them very commonly, but I have also heard that there are other parts of the country where they do not pop up as much in places where I have not spent as much time my friend TJ peers who runs mid-century homes out of Boise Idaho says that they just don’t find that color red to be very common out there.
There Boise local Frank Lloyd Wright mentee Art Trout owner who built a lot of homes in Boise was even more of a minimalist and he preferred only natural based color palettes, wood, stone cream, plaster and glass. So we have to ask, Did this idea for barn red homes Usonian road homes come directly to us from mid century’s grumpy Godfather Frank Lloyd Wright, I think yes and no.
Much of the power of this, this particular sort of dull, not quite cherry red, red stems from the influence of Wright who used as his literally as his signature color. He stamped his houses with a block of red tile. He loved the color so much that he requested that his coffin be draped in Red Velvet at that specific shade. You’ll spot this particular shade of red all over every Frank Lloyd Wright building. It was used to define all of the metalwork and iron work at falling water.
He used it in the floors and furniture of the Johnson wax administration building in Racine. It’s in the cabaret theatre at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, in his home attempt. Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin. There are so many places where this appears and so many of his apprentices and disciples used it in their buildings as well. But he did not invent this particular type of red. Like so many of his great ideas.
He didn’t come up with this in a vacuum. Red is a powerful lucky color in Chinese culture, the Egyptians wrapped their mummies in cloths dyed red with hematite. In the Aztec cultures, they used coconut oil to create Royal and religious garments in red. Roman general showed their rank was special red dyed cloaks that they wore that distinguish them from their troops and British officers later ripped off this idea for their officers red uniforms. And it’s the power culture of the Catholic Church.
So where did Wright encounter this color? Well, there’s some disagreement on this even if you ask the guy himself. Scholars have apparently suggested the inspiration for the color came from the red soil found around the Richard Lloyd home that he built in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the late 1920s. He’s also once quoted in Architectural Record as describing the color of steel beams on the top of the auditorium theater in Chicago, where he’d once worked had a reddish glow that excited him.
But Frank wasn’t always the best at crediting his sources, and I suspect him of other influences that he didn’t acknowledge, it might have been as prosaic as common barn color in the Midwest. areas around Wisconsin, Illinois and beyond are known for picturesque barns and farm buildings, which in Frank’s childhood would have been painted with ferrous oxide, commonly known as iron rust stained milk paint. The combination of milk and lime sealed the wood and the iron act is out of the mold and moss deterrent.
The signature of Frank Lloyd Wright red can be found all over the Midwestern countryside looking great in all seasons, and I don’t see how he could have possibly avoided this powerful visual influence. It’s also a common again rust based color oxidation based color in the cliffs of the Southwest. Or perhaps it was on his first trip to Japan, where the color red is hugely prominent across Japanese temples, Wright bizarrely consistently denied the influence of his travels in Japan on his design work.
Although he was an avid and proud collector of Japanese art, he constantly amassed prints and painted screens. He never admitted that any Japanese architecture had any effect on his own work. He went out of his way to deny the influence of Japanese design on his building style, something that I find, frankly, ludicrous to the point of being obnoxious. That’s the topic for another post. I would argue that any looking at any photo of any traditional building in Japan and looking at some of the buildings, Frank Lloyd Wright, designed for his own life and style around Taliesin would show you that there is shared DNA.
And I’ll throw some photos from my 2017 trip to Japan into the show notes page. And you can tell me that a guy who made his very first out of the country destination, Japan, and lived in Tokyo from 1917 to 1922, wasn’t influenced by their use of the power color read. Write, use read, not just as one of a wide ranging palette of go to colors, but often As the only color in a building in conjunction with an array of natural materials stone glass wood. Now he may well have committed to the iron stained red soil as his go to color in Tulsa in the 20s. But I believe he had the ideas seeded into his mind much earlier and I will stand by this theory until someone gives me a better reason not to.
Regardless of where he got the idea, you can absolutely use this color to signify that you want to put a Wright hand stamp on your home’s design. So you can think about bringing in an entire Usonian red paint job for the siding such as it is of your house, or putting in the color as an accent or pop in a tile in a chair and an element of art that pops up around the house. You basically can’t go wrong by repeating this consistent, radiant color.
Okay, just a couple more ideas before I wrap up the episode. The first is I’ve been dancing around the term Cherokee red the whole time. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times. But I very much prefer to use the term Usonian red or even Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite color. Because let’s be real, there is no historical connection between this color, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Cherokee Nation. He had no cultural association with them.
And the idea that he just sort of picked them out of the names of our Native American heritage and associated them with this color is insulting and culturally appropriative. He used that name and that is the easiest name to search for or describe to someone else if you need to use this for easy communication. But I don’t think we need to take the word of a guy who was so poor at quoting his own sources, and frankly made so many morally questionable choices throughout his life as our guide for what is an appropriate way to use terminology today.
So I will prefer to call this color Usonian read Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite color. And we’ll all know what we mean when we talk about it. And if you need to use the term, Cherokee red in order to get this color from a paint store, do that as long as you have to, and then move on to other names in your head if you so choose. But while we’re on the subject of applying that color to your home, there’s one more free resource you might want to check out in combination with this episode.
And that is the colors guide that I put together in response to constantly being asked what would my house look like if it was this color or my house has red brick? I don’t know what colors that could go with that my house has cream stone. I don’t know what colors would look good. With that. I put together a free guide showing a bunch of sketches of mid-century houses with some of those very common mid-century Midwestern materials and paint colors that look good and set off or help mute the various other masonry materials you might find on your house.
Or if you have no other stone or brick or masonry elements on your house, what a whole house in a certain color might look like.
So check out that free guide by going to mid mod dodge midwest.com/colors to download it and I promise you you’ll see a couple of examples of well deployed Usonian red in it. To recap, if you’re thinking about adding some Wrightian, some Usonian, some Prairie School elements to your mid-century home, look no farther than a simple material palette using stone, brick plaster and possibly Usonian red.
The most minimal of materials, simple plywood, regular shapes, and then using them in very clearly detail oriented aligned ways thinking about patterns that create horizontal lines thinking about following your eye around the room and having it hit on a number of elements that all line up in the same plane vertically or horizontally.
Think about how you can get into the micro detail of each space because Frank Lloyd Wright was not necessarily about choosing the most expensive materials, he was about making the most use of the materials he had with detailed design thinking. And you can do the same with a little bit of time and effort and a lot of being inspired by some gorgeous imagery that he has left us of his buildings.
If you want to take a look at some of the material palettes I put together that pick up on those threads, go to the show notes page at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1705 to see a few of them.
That’s all for now. I’m going to keep this episode short, because I’m gearing up now for the live event that’s going to take place today at 2pm. I really hope you will join me for the workshop on how to plan a remodel in 30 days.
And remember these techniques I’m going to talk about in 30 minutes of live event today at 2pm are good whether you’re thinking about a tiny bathroom improvement project or trying to get in all the thinking you can before you dive face first into an entire house remodel, same steps, same process, do not skip them.
And if you need to do it in less than 30 days, I’ll talk about what are the most essential elements you can draw out of even that. But the masterplan method will never do you wrong. You always have a little bit of time to ask the right questions in order to get better answers as you raced through the project at any speed. If you’re just looking for a way to kickstart your enthusiasm for summer projects show up anyway.
You can plan in longer than 30 days if you want to. But I’ll talk to you about what’s most important to think about for first regardless of your time horizon. Okay see you there at 2.