A Tour of the Final Home Designed By Frank Lloyd Wright: The Circular Sun House

Some remem­ber the nine­teen-nineties in Amer­i­ca as the sec­ond com­ing of the nine­teen-fifties. What­ev­er holes one can poke in that his­tor­i­cal fram­ing, it does feel strange­ly plau­si­ble inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cir­cu­lar Sun House. Though not actu­al­ly built until 1967, it was com­mis­sioned from Wright by ship­ping mag­nate Nor­man Lykes in 1959, the last year of the archi­tec­t’s life. Almost dat­ed though it may have looked by the time of its com­ple­tion, super­vised by Wright’s appren­tice John Rat­ten­bury, it would have accrued some retro cachet over the sub­se­quent decades. Then, in the ren­o­va­tion-mad nineties, the house­’s own­ers brought Rat­ten­bury back out to do a thor­ough update and remod­el.

The result is a kind of hybrid fifties-nineties aes­thet­ic, which will suit some tastes bet­ter than oth­ers. But then, so do all the res­i­dences designed by Wright, of which the Cir­cu­lar Sun House in Phoenix, Ari­zona, is the very last.

In the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, post­ed when the house went on the mar­ket in 2021, real estate agent Dean­na Peters points out a few of its Wright­ian fea­tures: its cir­cu­lar form, but also its curved hall­ways, its cus­tom-built cab­i­netry (Philip­pine mahogany, of course), its sig­na­ture “com­pres­sion-and-release” and “inside-out” spa­tial effects, its can­tilevered bal­cony, its inte­gra­tion with the desert envi­ron­ment, and even its car­port — Wright’s own coinage, and indeed his own inven­tion.

Also in the man­ner of most Wright-designed homes — as he him­self was known to acknowl­edge, and not with­out a boast­ful note — the Cir­cu­lar Sun House seems eas­i­er to look at than to live in, let alone main­tain. “The 3‑bedroom home last sold in 2019, before it had a brief peri­od on Airbnb (rent­ed for approx­i­mate­ly $1,395 a night),” wrote Homes & Gar­dens’ Megan Slack in 2023. At that time, it was on the mar­ket for $8.5 mil­lion, about half a mil­lion dol­lars more than its own­er want­ed in 2021. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, though it remains unsold as of this writ­ing, its ask­ing price has risen to $8,950,000. Wright’s name brings a cer­tain pre­mi­um, of course, but so do the trends of the moment: one hears, after all, that the nineties are back.

Relat­ed con­tent:

130+ Pho­tographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mas­ter­piece Falling­wa­ter

Take a Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the Man­sion That Has Appeared in Blade Run­ner, Twin Peaks & Count­less Hol­ly­wood Films

A Beau­ti­ful Visu­al Tour of Tir­ran­na, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remark­able, Final Cre­ations

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

Inside the Beau­ti­ful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.