The photo above looks through the kitchen there. Cooking takes place beyond what you see on the right; the door to the studio is in the background; dishes are on the left along with a cupboard for breakfast food. The place to wash the dishes is behind the shelves.
I’ve posted that photo above because today I’m going to write about the kitchen in Wright’s winter home. I think it showed Wright’s changing attitude about other kitchens he designed at that time.
Way back…
When giving tours, Hillside was where you saw the students in the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and the Taliesin Fellowship living their daily lives.
btw: the School of Architecture still exists, is an accredited Master’s program in architecture, and is now at another site in Arizona.
When I brought groups into the building, I talked about his Aunts’ school and other things, then opened the front door and told them to go “UP the steps” and “TO THE LEFT”
and sometimes, yes, I thought about Kevin Costner saying “BACK and to the RIGHT” from the movie, JFK by Oliver Stone
into the Assembly Hall.
I talked about the room, then took the group to the bench overlooking the dining room.
I first put this photo in “Charred Beams at Taliesin“
At that time, you might come upon the Taliesin Fellowship and students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture having lunch in the tables you see in the photo above.
If we did, I’d ask people to stand back a little so they weren’t peering at people having lunch.
MY STANDARD STATEMENT
was:
“We like to give them the illusion that they have a little bit of privacy.“
That usually got the appreciative chuckle
which is usually what I hoped for.
Yeah, I know some guides got hearty laughs, but I didn’t screw myself into knots trying for that.
Regardless, we talked about how the building changed, a.k.a.: FIRE
NO, not THAT fire
Or that OTHER fire
But the HILLSIDE fire
and how the Fellowship apprentices in the worked in the kitchen one floor below.
apprentices/students consistently worked in the kitchen on a weekly, rotating basis.
Then I often told my groups what I’d heard about apprentices being assigned to kitchen duties:
“Wright said, ‘how can you design a kitchen, if you’ve never worked in one?'”
If I felt like jabbing the Wright-icon a little I might say, “it’s doubtful he ever worked in a kitchen in his life,” which, surprisingly, is not completely accurate.
It’s not like he was there working weekly, but I read the memory of one Fellowship member that Wright taught them how to shred lettuce by hand.
REGARDLESS
for your enjoyment, I’m including the image I originally took at a work picnic and photoshopped it to make Wright standing at the grill:
Ok,
Getting back to what I started writing about today:
I began thinking about the kitchen at Taliesin West after the publications committee at the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy was talking about exploring Wright and kitchens.
The kitchen at Taliesin West is a lot different from Taliesin in Wisconsin, in part because of the different construction history.
I don’t know if Wright had ever been so intimately involved in its construction before.
And probably not connected to getting a kitchen up and running.
In short,
in late 1937, Wright located the land in Arizona where he’d build Taliesin West and told all of the apprentices to come to Arizona and bring,
among other things
the viola, cello, and concrete mixer.1
Then, in November 1939 new apprentice Curtis Besinger (in the Fellowship until 1955) came to “the camp” (Taliesin West) for the first time.
He later wrote later that at that time it
consisted of “the office,” the drafting room…., the kitchen and its storeroom, rooms in which Gene and Wes and Svetlana were to live, and the “small theater” which Mr. Wright referred to as “the Kiva.”…
Curtis Besinger. Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1995), 44.
This new site, as Wright wrote, was “26-miles from Phoenix” and “over the rim of the world”.2
Therefore, the kitchen and studio were among the first things he built, and there were (are) all in one line.
You can see this in the floor plan of Taliesin West that I put below. I shaded the kitchen in light red so it sticks out more:
1941. It looks like this drawing was one of the drawings done for In the Nature of Materials, 1887-1941: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock.
The kitchen is open on both sides and you could walk from there right into the studio.
I wonder if being that close to the kitchen was distracting for the apprentices while working. Or if the drawings have lots of coffee stains on them.
The kitchen set up
I picked up some photos of the kitchen that are published in the Taliesin West Master Plan.
You can get that as a .pdf online from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Both photos I show of the kitchen are on page 54.
The black and white one was taken looking from above, c. 1950:
In the photo above you see apprentices standing around a counter that looks the same or in the same place as the counter you see in the color photo below:
If you were standing where the photographer was in the photo in color, the studio is to the left and the dining room is to the right. Behind the photographer are the dishes and glasses you see in the photo at the top of the page. Behind them is the washing area.
The first time I stayed
at Taliesin West, I was there for a couple of days when the Administrator of Historic Studies then at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation said, “You know, to become part of the community when people stay here awhile, they clean up after themselves.” Meaning: I needed to prep my dishes rather than just put them into the rubber container for someone else to clean.
Like I wrote in “Intruders in Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings“, I came to Taliesin West to research.
Wright’s archives were still there at that time; now, they’re in NYC.
Getting there had been a wish of mine for years and one year I got a raise of a couple of bucks an hour and complained to my boyfriend that “They could have sent me down there for how much they’re paying me!!!” He said, “Well, why don’t you take some of that money, buy a plane ticket and just go?”
It so happened I heard from someone in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation a day or two later and mentioned my thought on getting down there. He wrote, “Let me get back to you,” and replied later that he’d reserved a space for me for a week.
In the winter!!!
They put me in rooms above the kitchen and dining rooms (now used for offices).
I wrote in “Intruders in Frank Lloyd Wright buildings” how I was stopped by someone before going up to my room.
It was a great deal: while there, I’d go downstairs in the morning and get coffee and cereal before walking a couple hundred yards to the Archives building.
Then, I’d come back for lunch. At those times, I was one of the people “in the fish bowl” that visitors saw on tours.
And, jsyk: since my trips were only a week long, I tuned out the public passing by.
First Published April 18, 2026.
I took the photograph at the top of this page on January 27, 2011.
Notes:
- which caused problems I mentioned in my “Preservation by Distribution” post.
- Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, new and revised ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 452.
