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Frank Lloyd Wright in Ann Arbor Thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright, Bill and Mary Palmer raised their family in a work of art. On a Saturday morning in 2001, a group that included prominent local architect Larry Brink; Doug Kelbaugh, dean of the U-M’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; builder Bruce Niethammer; and George Colone, a heating specialist from Hutzel Plumbing & Heating, met to discuss a failing radiant heat system beneath the concrete floor of a fifty-year-old house. If it had been just any house, the solution would have been obvious: jackhammer the concrete and replace the pipes. But on hearing that suggestion, owner Mary Palmer recalls, “I nearly fainted. It wasn’t acceptable.” The reason so many people shared her concern was that the floor in question was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The group worked out a solution that would preserve the part of the radiant system that still worked, about a third of the total. Hutzel would install a new boiler and radiators to heat the rest of the house—but would hide all the new components behind couches, inside cabinets, and under beds. “‘Change’ is not in the vocabulary up there,” says Bruce Niethammer, who’s worked on the house since 1974. “The Palmers maintained their house the best of all owners,” says Brink, who trained under Wright and has consulted on hundreds of Wright homes. “They took the best care of the house from day one.” But while staying true to Wright and his principles, Mary and her husband, Bill, made the house their own, using it to express and enhance their interests in music, yoga, gardening, and art. “You take something, it becomes part of you, you become part of it,” explains the Palmers’ good friend Priscilla Neel, who is also an architect. “That’s what makes a building individual.” It was quite a coup in 1950 to get the foremost architect of the century to design a house for a young couple in Ann Arbor. The Palmers had no “in” with Wright; they just asked him. But from meeting Mary Palmer 260 fifty years later, it is clear why she would be drawn to Frank Lloyd Wright. She is a gracious woman with a hint of a southern accent (she grew up in North Carolina), and her whole demeanor—her simple but elegant style of dress, her artistic sense, and her concern with doing things right—fit into a whole, like the perfectly integrated details of a Wright design. Mary and Bill Palmer met as students at the U-M—Mary in music and Bill in economics. After graduation Bill was asked to stay and teach. In the early years of their marriage, the Palmers lived in an old farmhouse on Geddes, now the home of attorney Clan Crawford. The older women in the neighborhood befriended Mary. “They broke the rules about not inviting instructors to dinner parties,” she recalls. “These ladies knew gardens, literature—they were rich in what Ann Arbor had to offer.” Elizabeth Inglis, who lived in the family estate on Highland (today the U-M’s Inglis House), was one of these remarkable women. One morning she phoned Mary to tell her that the road behind her house was being extended for building sites. Mary called Bill at work, and he came home at lunchtime. Mrs. Inglis, in gardening boots, showed them what she considered the best lot. “This is the most beautiful place in the city,” she told them. The young couple took her advice and bought both that lot and the one next to it—a total of one and a half acres of varied terrain. Mary, a woman of wide intellectual interests, spent hours reading at the U-M’s architecture library while thinking about what kind of house to build on the site on Orchard Hills Drive. At the time she was very interested in antiques, so it might seem natural that she would have been drawn to a traditional style. But she was also very interested in Japan, one of Wright’s sources of inspiration. She had visited Japan, audited classes on Japanese art, and taken Japanese language classes. Mary’s reading led her to Wright. The architect was then eighty-three years old but still active. Hoping to see one of his homes for herself, Mary telephoned Gregor and Elizabeth Affleck, who lived in a 1941 Wright house in Bloomfield Hills. The Afflecks responded...

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