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  Walter V. Davidson House
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  Dining Room with Built-In Side Board
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  Interior view of front entrance
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  Living room with two-story bay window

Walter V. Davidson House is a residence designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1908 for Larkin Company executive Walter V. Davidson, located at 57 Tillinghast Place in Buffalo, NY. The residence is an example of Wright's Prairie School style.

Design

The residence incorporates Prairie style elements found in most of Wright's designs of the era: banded casement windows; broad over-hanging cantilevered eaves; low, hipped roof; clerestory windows in the living room; use of roman brick in the fire place and hearth, vertical wooden slats creating a "screen" to hide the stairway; built-in exterior planters; and an overall emphasis on horizontal lines. It is notable that the windows in the Davidson House do not incorporate the use of art glass as in so many other Wright houses of the period. The windows consist of leaded diamond-shaped panes. The panes are, however, oriented horizontally rather than vertically, uncommon to the era and Wright's way of emphasizing the horizontal. It is also notable that each pane is offset a number of degrees, rather than laid flat in one plane, affording privacy due to light reflecting off the glass in different directions. The overall shape of the house is cruciform. The rear/side section is split level and contains the utilities, laundry, pantry, and maid's quarters in a half-sub level; a kitchen and hidden entrance on the ground level; and bedrooms and bathroom on the second level. The front single story arm of the cruciform is the dining room, the rear is the porch. The living room is two stories high. The floor plan is almost identical to the Isabel Roberts House, built the same year, only mirror-imaged and rotated ninety degrees from the street.

Renovation

In the 1930s the residence was renovated to incorporate a master suite located over the garage to the rear/side of the main residence. One of the bedrooms of the main house was reduced in size to make way for a hallway leading to a master suite, consisting of a dressing chamber, bathroom, and sleeping chamber. The new addition incorporated the same diamond-leaded-glass casement windows prevalent in the rest of the house.

References

Aguar, Charles E. & Berdeana. WRIGHTSCAPES Frank Lloyd Wright's Landscape Designs. McGraw-Hill, 2002, ISBN 0071377689
Maddex, Diane. Wright-Sized Houses: Frank Lloyd Wright's Solutions For Making Small Houses Feel Big. Harry N. Abrams , Inc., 2003, ISBN 0810946262
Manson, Grant Carpenter. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT TO 1910: The First Golden Age. Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., Inc., 1958, ISBN 0442261306
Storrer, William Allin. The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion. University of Chicago Press, 2006, ISBN 0226776212

External Links

Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo Legacy
The Walter V. Davidson House
News stories about the FLW Davidson House in Buffalo, NY