PENNSYLVANIA
Fallingwater
This is a bit of a detour from our existing trip in Virginia. Basically I had never heard of Frank Lloyd Wright until I read the Hyperion Cantos where for some reason Fallingwater and Taliesin are critical locations in some of the later books. I missed Taliesin West when I was in Arizona because of COVID and I knew I didn’t want to miss my chance on this trip.
Fallingwater is a historical Wright house in the boonies of Pennsylvania about 1.5 hours from Pittsburgh and 3.5 hours from DC. From our Airbnb in Winchester it was about 2.5 hours of driving that took us through Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia again, and then finally to Pennsylvania. Wright designed and built the house for the Kaufman’s in the 50’s as a summer getaway. In today’s dollars, the house would’ve cost ~2.9 million dollars to build!
Unfortunately even with looking for tickets early, I couldn’t get two tickets for the interior tour so we had to content ourselves with only the outdoors. I didn’t want to drive 2.5 hours for just that though so I ended up buying tickets for the interior tour of Polymath Park houses. Something I didn’t realize but the organization was kind enough to email me about was that Polymath and Fallingwater are actually 22 miles from each other and about a 45 minute drive. If you choose to do both in the same day, bear this in mind!
The outside walk around of Fallingwater is well.. a bit underwhelming… I didn’t really have expectations but it seemed like the house needed a little TLC and you can’t see very much. We probably wandered around for 20 minutes before we’d seen pretty much every angle we could. The prettiest view is from a viewpoint down a short trail
I am definitely glad we had more to do out there, because otherwise it would’ve been a long ass drive for not a very good payout!
We headed over to Polymath Park which as advertised took about 45 minutes through farm country. I was certainly not expecting a bunch of Frank Lloyd Wright houses to pop up while we were en route. The houses are tucked away in woodland. We did a tour by bus with a bus driver giving us the tours of each house. There were three, two of which had been moved painstakingly from other locations.
The history of these houses and how they got here is pretty interesting and if you’re into mid century architecture this tour is for you!
I’m personally a big fan of the bedrooms with wall-to-wall windows and the living room with floor to ceiling windows, looking out into the woods. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the houses but we learned you can actually book them for overnight stays like an Airbnb!
Hopefully COVID will be less of an issue by the time you’re reading this but I do recommend being vaccinated before doing these tours. One of Wright’s tenants while designing a house was compression and then release, so his houses tend to have small hallways that expand into bigger rooms with large windows. This does make it hard to social distance, even while wearing a mask.
For lunch/dinner on our way back to Winchester, we ate at a place called Horn O Plenty in Bedford, Pennsylvania. I got the spicy pickle burger and some sweet tea. It was just the pick me up I needed for the long drive home!