Around the Bay Area, the Marin County Civic Center is known as Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest achievement. The largest constructed work to come off his drafting table, it’s a shining Versailles of inimitable vision that may be quite an eye-opener for those coming in simply to fight a traffic ticket.
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But Wright’s quieter legacy lies in the houses he designed for ordinary people. There are roughly a half-dozen around the Bay Area, executed in a modest yet alluring style he called Usonian (his shorthand for architecture that’s uniquely “United States of North Independent America”). Young professionals wrote the star architect begging him to make their dream homes. To their great surprise, he often agreed, descending with cape and cane to manifest beautiful designs for the ages.
Born in 1867 in Wisconsin, Wright moved to the Bay Area in the 1950s to oversee his projects here. His time in the region marked an important period in his career for both projects finished and unrealized. Among his never-built structures were a wedding pavilion for Berkeley’s Claremont Resort & Club and a butterfly-themed Bay Bridge with a lush, hanging garden. Even Hollywood has benefited from his local work: Since his death in 1959, his architecture has been featured in films from “Gattaca” to George Lucas’ first movie, “THX 1138.”
Interior view of the Marin County Civic Center building designed by legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright in San Rafael, Calif., on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
“Extending over nearly sixty years and including a broad range of building types, Wright’s Bay Area works are distinctive mainly for their diversity and the unprecedented nature of many of them,” writes Stanford professor emeritus Paul V. Turner in his 2016 book, “Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco.” “They demonstrate, perhaps more than his buildings in any other location, the amazing variety and innovation of his creations, and the fertility of his imagination.”
The gold tower stands out from the roof of the Marin County Civic Center building designed by legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright in San Rafael, Calif., on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
So what exactly is a Usonian home?
“It’s a made-up term. He wanted to see an indigenous American architecture flourish here in this country and not ape European architecture,” says William J. “Bill” Schwarz, a licensed architect in Marin County who worked on the Civic Center and was close with Wright’s local protege, Aaron Green. “He sought an expression of American democracy – freedom, in other words, extension, openness. Democracy is fragile, but it’s open, and it’s vulnerable. So Wright’s little houses are a little bit fragile, and they have lots of glass.”
Sunlight illuminates the dining table at the Bazett-Frank House in Hillsborough, Calif., on April 8, 2025. The house was designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
The houses were to be affordable and accessible to the middle class; Wright even produced “Usonian Automatic” plans, like DIY Sears kits, for folks who weren’t professional builders. They typically had modular and repeating motifs, a concrete-slab floor with radiant heating, fluid spaces that blurred room separations and flat roofs that often sprung leaks, the bane of his career.
Unpainted wood and other natural materials factored large as did sprawling glass windows that opened onto courtyards and green spaces. There was a distinct lack of garages. “He had a lot of ideas about what he thought was a waste of resources,” says John H. Waters, preservation programs director at Chicago’s Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. “To him, a car was perfectly fine — this is someone from Wisconsin. But he thought, ‘Why spend money on the walls of a space for a car, when you can spend it on your own space?’”
The floor features hexagonal patterns at the Bazett-Frank House in Hillsborough, California,The house was designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
The Hanna House on the Stanford University campus is the earliest and one of the best examples of Usonian principles in the Bay Area. Erected in 1937, the house relies on a grid system of hexagons – like a bee’s honeycomb – and lacks traditional right angles.
“There’s not a 90-degree corner in the house in terms of the arrangement of the walls,” says Schwarz. “He thought it was an interesting alternative that would facilitate human movement through the spaces – you’d bump up against a 90-degree corner, but you’d kind of glance off a 120-degree corner. He was an innovator, and if anything came to his attention that was different than what’s been done, he would explore it.”
Perforated board windows inside the Bazett-Frank House are seen in Hillsborough, Calif. The house was designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
Next up for Wright was the Sidney Bazett House in Hillsborough, built in 1940 with a similar hexagonal grid and “sleeping boxes” that opened up to the outdoors. These homes gain their names from their owners; this one’s also known as the Bazett-Frank House for a subsequent owner who built an addition. It’s also important to note that most of these homes are privately owned and not available for tours.
The Bazett home features the smallest bedroom Wright ever designed, which for unclear reasons was nicknamed the “Mummy Room” — perhaps because it felt as cramped as a sarcophagus? Famed architect Bernard Maybeck stopped by during its construction, according to Turner’s book, and expressed himself as “both puzzled and intrigued.”
The Robert Berger House in San Anselmo was based on a Wright plan but built by the owner, who beginning in the early 1950s would pour into it 20 years of backbreaking labor. The thick walls were made by dropping rough-cut stones into wood frames and flooding concrete over them to create a rustic desert vibe with visible stone in the surfaces. Near the end, the owner estimated he’d lifted more than a million pounds of material and must have the “heaviest house in Marin County.”
Main entrance of a house designed by legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright in San Anselmo, Calif., on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
These painstaking design touches were vintage Wright. “He would design everything, if he could. He’d design the silverware if you let him,” says Schwarz.
For instance, the Berger home is notable for having the smallest structure Wright ever devised – a doghouse for the owner’s 12-year-old son, named Eddie’s House in honor of the special pup. The canine hut had all the traits of Wright’s style, including a hidden entrance in the back and an overhanging roof that was quite flat – and leaked. The story goes the dog refused to use it, which the son recalled as being “kind of depressing.”
A doghouse designed by legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright is on permanent display in the cafeteria at the Marin County Civic Center building, which was also designed by Wright in San Rafael, Calif., on Wednesday, April 9, 2025. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
Wright designed at least two other existing homes in the Bay Area: the circa-1950 Mathews House in Atherton, remarkable for its lovely use of organic materials, and the late-1940s Maynard Buehler House in Orinda. An example of Wright’s fandom for Asian art and culture, the latter property had enchanting gardens created by Henry Matsutani Sr., lead designer of the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.
The young owners who originally commissioned Wright went through some alarm seeing their construction budget double. “I’m sitting around here watching my wife become a nervous wreck!” the husband wrote the architect, according to Turner. “Every day, she meets the mailman half way up the block looking for a letter from you. She is worrying herself sick about rising building costs.”
The husband described Wright as the “most domineering person I ever met,” and the wife considered him “arrogant” and “self-centered.” One issue of contention was her request for a bigger kitchen, which reportedly led Wright to remark: “Madame, you do not seem to realize that women have been emancipated from the kitchen.”
Living room view inside the historic Maynard Buehler House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on April 17, 2025 in Orinda, Calif. The room features redwood and part of the ceiling covered in 24-carat gold. (Douglas Despres /Bay Area News Group)
It’s true that Wright could rub people the wrong way. There’s a reason that Ayn Rand cited him as the partial inspiration for Howard Roark, the individualist-architect hero of “The Fountainhead.” He had strong opinions underlying his work and did not suffer criticism without a fight.
Mark Anthony Wilson, an art historian and professor living in Berkeley, recalls being a child and attending one of Wright’s lectures. Two students in the audience decided to be smart alecks and ambushed him about his belief that everything in a home must have a function.
“They said, ‘In one of your houses in Wisconsin there’s a staircase that doesn’t go anywhere — it just leads up to the top of a platform, and there’s no access. So why did you put in a nonfunctioning staircase?” recalls Wilson, author of the 2018 book, “Frank Lloyd Wright on the West Coast.” “He said, ‘OK, I’ll tell you why I designed that. I designed it for the two of you to climb up to the top and jump off.’
A main bedroom view inside the historic Maynard Buehler House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright on April 17, 2025 in Orinda, Calif. (Douglas Despres/Bay Area News Group)
“That was rewarded with laughter, including from my parents. And that’s classic Wright, of course.”
In the end, the owners of the Buehler House made peace with Wright, and the wife even called him a genius. “Overlooking the leaks in the roof,” they wrote to him, “we can’t imagine living anywhere else – we love it.”