The house stands at 428 Forest Avenue and the studio at 951 Chicago Avenue, on the corner between them, in Oak Park — a village immediately west of Chicago and not part of the city. Accounts that place it in Chicago, or that imply as much by not saying, send visitors to the wrong municipality.
Frank Lloyd Wright built the house in 1889, when he was twenty-two, and worked here until 1909. It is where the Prairie style was worked out, and the building was his laboratory for it.
Wright borrowed five thousand dollars from his employer, Louis Sullivan, who took title to the land as security and required repayment within five years. The house cost a little over five thousand three hundred to build, of which some twelve hundred came from Wright's own savings. He was in his early twenties and working in the most advanced architectural office in the country, and he spent the money on a demonstration of what he thought a house should be.
Wright left in 1909. He had grown dissatisfied with the practice, and he went to Europe to prepare the portfolio of drawings that would make his reputation there. He went with Mamah Borthwick, the wife of a client, and left Catherine and the children behind. The scandal ended his Oak Park career, and the date is why the building has been restored to the way it stood that year — the moment he walked out of it.
He converted the place into rental accommodation in 1911, borrowing from a client, Darwin D. Martin, to pay for the work, and it was altered repeatedly by later owners.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation bought it in 1975. Restoration to the 1909 arrangement took more than a decade, the studio work beginning in 1982 and the rededication falling in May 1987. The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust bought the house outright in 2012 and runs the site today. It is a National Historic Landmark.
The interior can only be seen on a guided tour, and tours sell out, particularly at weekends. Booking ahead is the difference between going in and looking at the outside of a house.
A visitor centre has been a long time coming. A design was rejected by Oak Park's historic preservation commission in 2019, revised, and finally approved by the village in 2024, so the arrangements at the site are liable to change.
Oak Park holds an unusual concentration of Wright buildings, almost all of them private houses that can only be looked at from the pavement; the Trust publishes a walking route for them. Unity Temple, a few streets away, is the other one to go inside — and unlike the Home and Studio it is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, as part of a group of eight Wright buildings listed in 2019.
The Robie House, the fully resolved Prairie house that the Oak Park years were building towards, is regularly described as being used in part as offices by the University of Chicago. The university moved out in early 1997.
It has since been restored, the interior work finishing in March 2019, and it operates as a house museum run jointly by the National Trust and the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust. It stands in Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago rather than in Oak Park, and it is one of the eight buildings in the 2019 UNESCO inscription.
Oak Park is reached from the Loop on the CTA or on Metra, in roughly half an hour. It is worth allowing most of a day if Unity Temple and a walk round the streets are included. General practicalities for the city are on the Chicago page.