FLW designs should always look organic, like they grew out of the landscape in which they were placed. They should never be obtrusive.
And watch out for the owners of privately owned FLW homes! My favorite example is
a house on a corner lot just about a block north of Lake St. It's the Nathan Moore house. The house sits on the southwest corner. It's on Forest Av. What makes this home distinctive is that it looks like FLW tried to merge his designs with English Tudor. It has a very, very wide chimney near the front of the house.
Back around 1998 I was in Oak Park photographing some of the buildings there and that I was trying to get some shots of this house. The house is so tall, I had to stand across the street from it to get all of it in the frame (I didn't have a wide angle lens with me at the time). Before too long an older guy comes out of the house and starts to ask me what I doing there. I told him I was photographing the house for inclusion into an art project I have, Great Homes of Oak Park to be hung in the hallway of my home. He didn't take to kindly to that.
He said HE holds the copyright to ANY photos of the house and HE controls who takes what photos, etc. I asked him if he minded me taking photos and he said he DID mind and then told me to beat it. So I left. That's the first and last time I ever ran into anything like that. A woman that worked at the studio told me a few years later that the Moore house is pretty much off limits and is never opened for the annual tours of the homes that they have.
BTW, the house is situated very strangely on it's lot. If you look at the photo below the front porch faces the side yard and garden and the part with the huge Tudor overhang faces Forest Av, the main street. On the back of the house there is a small entrance and garage doors and a few windows. It's like the house is turned 90 degrees to the left of where it should be.
But it is my favorite FLW house design and I would love to see the inside some day.
en.wikipedia.org
