Fallingwater

In the early 1930s Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann, who ran Pittsburgh's leading department store, owned a rugged tract of forest at Bear Run where their family and employees came to swim and rest. Their son Edgar Jr. had gone to study with Frank Lloyd Wright, and through him the family commissioned the aging architect, whose career many had written off, to design a weekend house on the land. The Kaufmanns expected a house with a view of their favorite waterfall, but Wright, according to the well-told story, drew the plans in a burst as they drove out to meet him and placed the house squarely over the falls instead.

The daring engineering of the cantilevers alarmed the builders and even the Kaufmanns' own consulting engineers, and the terraces did begin to sag over the years, requiring a major structural repair decades later to save them. Completed in 1937 with a guest house added soon after, Fallingwater became a sensation almost at once, landing Wright on the cover of Time magazine and reviving a career that carried on for two more remarkable decades. In 1963 Edgar Kaufmann Jr. entrusted the house, its furnishings, and thousands of surrounding acres to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which has kept it open to the public and preserved as Wright left it ever since.

Wright called his approach organic architecture, meaning a building should belong to its site as naturally as the trees around it. At Fallingwater he took that idea to its limit. The horizontal concrete terraces echo the flat sandstone ledges of the stream bed, the stone walls are laid from rock quarried on the property, and the great boulder the family loved was left rising through the living room floor to form the fireplace, warmed by the fire and cooled by the water below.

Inside, the rooms are low and compressed, then open suddenly onto light and terrace, a rhythm Wright used to make the house feel woven into the woods. A hatch in the living room floor opens onto a suspended stairway that leads straight down to the stream, so the water is not just heard but reachable. Every detail, from the built-in furniture to the corner windows that open with no post between them, was designed to pull the forest inward and blur where the house ends and the land begins.

The house sits within a nature reserve of thousands of acres that the Kaufmanns and later the Conservancy protected, a Laurel Highlands landscape of hemlock and hardwood forest, sandstone outcrops, and dense rhododendron that blooms creamy pink in early summer. Bear Run itself tumbles down through this country in a series of falls and pools, of which the one beneath the house is only the most famous.

The wider region was long the homeland of Native peoples, including the Lenape and, in this western reach of the state, the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee, before treaties and displacement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. None are federally recognized in Pennsylvania today, and descendant nations continue elsewhere. The forest that gives Fallingwater its setting is a piece of that older landscape, kept wild deliberately so the house would never stand alone.

Spring wakes the woods with fresh green and the first rush of high water down Bear Run, and by early summer the rhododendron blooms and the falls run full, a favorite time for the house's photograph-perfect look. Summer is the busiest season, cool under the hemlocks even on warm days.

Autumn is many visitors' favorite, when the surrounding hardwoods turn gold and red and frame the gray concrete and stone against a blaze of color. Winter closes in quiet and stark, the falls sometimes hung with ice and the bare trees revealing the full geometry of the cantilevers, and the house runs a reduced schedule, so it pays to check ahead before a cold-season visit.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.