I had a small role...
... in the restoration of the Rosenbaum House in Florence, AL. This was one of Wright's early Usonians (the second or third one to be built IIRC). It was built in 1939, with an addition, also designed by Wright, in 1948.
I took a tour of the house in 1991, when the lady of the house, Mrs. Rosenbaum, was still living there (she has since passed). The living spaces -- the living room, the dining area, and the library -- were absolutely fantastic. The original bedrooms were cozy but comfortable. There were three brick columns which held two large steel beams in the L-shape of the floor plan; these comprised the entire load bearing structure of the house. The roofs were balanced on them, and there were no bearing walls.
Wright regarded kitchens as a waste of space, and accordingly, the original kitchen was an absolutely tiny, galley-style interior room with no windows. Strictly a one-person kitchen. A considerably larger kitchen came with the addition, and they used the original kitchen as a bar. The newer kitchen had metal cabinetry with all appliances built into it -- cooktop, oven, fridge, dishwasher. The cooktop was an area within the metal countertop. The addition had a big dorm-style bedroom for their four sons.
The house had radiant heat, and it was still working in 1991. Mrs. Rosenbaum told me that the original boiler was electric, but they were horrified at the operating cost and quickly had a gas boiler installed. Wright had recognized the need for air conditioning in Alabama, and came up with a clever solution for concealing it: he took window units and enclosed them in ventilated enclosures, then he had the controls remotely installed in a small box on the wall. In the bedrooms, it was right next to the beds.
Anyway, by 1999 Mrs. Rosenbaum had moved to a nursing home. The University of North Alabama bought the house to restore, but it was in bad shape by then. The roof had always been a problem -- Wright had experimented with an rubber-membrane roofing system that never worked right -- and in her last few years Mrs. Rosenbaum had not been able to keep the house maintained. Most of the original furniture had gotten damaged by water leaks, and a good bit of it had been discarded. So most of the rooms were left empty, since the UNA restorers didn't know how they had been furnished.
When we were working with our architect (also a big Wright fan) on the design of our house in 2005, he mentioned that UNA was looking for photographs of how the house looked when the Rosenbaums lived there. Well, it just so happened that I had photographed it extensively during my 1991 visit. I got a second set of prints run off of my negatives and sent them to UNA, and they used those to re-furnish the house. So that was my role in the restoration.
