Look for a large, brown home with a shingled exterior and an eye-catching, tall, flat-topped brick chimney right in front-its steep, pointed rooflines make it stand out from the leafy trees around it.
Welcome to the George W. Smith House! Take a deep breath and imagine yourself in Oak Park back in the late 1800s. The streets are much quieter, you can almost smell sawdust on the wind, and there’s a sense of excitement in the air-because an up-and-coming architect by the name of Frank Lloyd Wright has just unveiled this striking, shingle-clad creation.
Back in 1895, Wright was approached to design a series of affordable homes for an inventor named Charles E. Roberts. But just like many dreams of that era, the plans for the Smith House sat unbuilt for a few years, until George W. Smith, a salesman for the legendary Marshall Field & Company, decided he wanted something unique-something that would impress the neighbors!
Take a closer look and you’ll see this house is a bit of a rebel. The angled break in the roofline, the wide, flat chimney at the front-it was full of little experiments, almost as if Wright was warming up for his future masterworks. It’s dressed in what’s called the Shingle style, with brown wooden shingles wrapping around the house, perfectly smooth, without any pesky corner boards to break up the surface. The house looks like it was made with the same hands that built old ships-no wonder it stands out so much from the neighboring homes.
One of the most interesting things is how you’re standing in front of what we might call “Wright: The Prequel.” The way the trim folds around the corners and the feeling of a single, unified design-these details popped up again, years later, in the world-famous Unity Temple (which, by the way, you’ll visit later). At the time, most of Oak Park was still catching up. Wright was already veering away from old-fashioned Queen Anne gingerbread and toward the wide-open horizontals and geometric lines that would make him famous.
The Smith House is also full of mystery-was it always shingle-clad, or did its look change over the years? Early photos have vanished, so we may never know. But today, we do know this: you’re gazing at a rare early Wright home, one of only two he built in this entire historic neighborhood, and the only one where you might imagine bumping into George W. Smith himself coming home with a cartload of sales samples. And if you listen closely, you might just hear the whispers of architectural experiments in the gentle rattle of those original windows.
Ready to continue down the avenue, time traveler? Let’s see what other stories Oak Park has to share!
