Frank Lloyd Wright Martin House

In the early 1900s Darwin Martin was a self-made executive at a large Buffalo mail-order company, and he became one of Frank Lloyd Wright's most important early patrons. Martin gave Wright unusually open latitude and a generous budget, and the architect responded with one of the fullest expressions of his emerging Prairie style.

Wright rejected the tall, boxy, compartmented houses of the Victorian era. Instead he stretched the Martin House out low and wide across its lot, opened the interior into flowing spaces, and pulled the design outward into pergolas, gardens, and terraces so the buildings and the land became one composition. It was a radical vision of the American home, and the Martins let him pursue it to the fullest.

The genius of the Martin House is that it is not one building but a family of them, arranged as a single unified whole. The main house connects through a long, planted pergola to a domed conservatory, and beyond that to the carriage house and stable. A smaller companion house for Martin's sister anchors another corner of the block, and all of it is bound together by Wright's insistent horizontal lines.

Inside, the architecture never stops. Wright designed the built-in furniture, the fireplaces, the lighting, and roughly four hundred art-glass windows and doors, many carrying the geometric Tree of Life motif that has become an icon of American design. Ribbons of these windows wrap the rooms so that daylight enters filtered through pattern, and inside and outside blur into each other.

The Martins lost their fortune in the crash of 1929, and after Darwin Martin's death the family left the house. It stood empty for years, was damaged, and by the middle of the century parts of the complex, including the pergola, conservatory, and carriage house, had been torn down and replaced with an apartment building on part of the grounds.

Beginning in the 1990s a determined restoration effort set out to reverse all of it. The intrusive apartment building was removed, the demolished structures were reconstructed from Wright's drawings and archival photographs, and the surviving buildings were meticulously repaired. Art glass was recreated, gardens were replanted, and piece by piece the complex was returned to its 1905 form. The result is one of the most complete Wright restorations anywhere.

Visits are by guided tour, which lead through the main house and its connected pavilions and out along the reconstructed pergola to the conservatory, where a statue stands framed at the far end of a long axial view, a favorite Wright device. Guides explain the design ideas, the art glass, and the story of the family and the rescue.

The Martin House anchors a whole Buffalo of Wright and Olmsted landmarks, and the city has embraced it as a cornerstone of a remarkable architectural legacy. For anyone interested in American design, standing inside these flowing, light-filled rooms is a rare chance to see a Prairie masterwork whole and restored.

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