House of the Week - Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater

I visited Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Pennsylvania country house, when I was 20. I went with a college buddy on a magnificent Fall weekend. Amazingly, the house is built over a waterfall. At first glance in photographs it looks impossible, fantastic and larger than life, but in person it is an intimate, enveloping house. You are so close to the beauty of the landscape that you almost feel a part of it.

Fallingwater was built for the Kaufmann family in 1935. In 1963 Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. entrusted the house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, making it available to the public. To read more about this fascinating house and Frank Lloyd Wright please visit the Fallingwater website.


View from the driveway


View of the stairs to the waterfall






West tower


Guest house pool


Living room




Dining room with portrait of Edgar Kaufmann, Sr.



From the Fallingwater website:

"The stream flows in front of the house (and under part of the cantilevered living room and terraces), but breaks at an angle away from the house at the upper waterfall, creating the illusion of water pouring out from under the house itself. The cantilevered levels and terraces with their light colored low walls look similar to the ledges below; it almost looks like the house is somehow part of the rock formations or even that the house grew out of the hillside. The southwest terrace nearest the camera (above and to the left of the falls) is doubly cantilevered, and from another view seems almost to hover in space."

All images via the Fallingwater website.