Frank Lloyd Wright came home to the Wyoming Valley in 1911, chased out of Chicago by newspaper stories about his affair with Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

The land belonged to his mother’s family, and Wright had spent several boyhood summers farming it. He bought a hillside there and started building. He named the place Taliesin, Welsh for “shining brow,” and set the house just below the crest so it would be “of the hill,” not on it.

Taliesin sits in Iowa County, across the Wisconsin River from Spring Green. The estate now covers about 800 acres, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Trail.

Built from the hill

Local farmers helped Wright haul yellow limestone from a nearby quarry, and he mixed sand from the river into the walls, according to Taliesin Preservation. The interior plaster was tinted with sienna to give it a golden color. Wright described the layout as “low, wide, and snug.” The cantilevered roofs, wide windows and open floor plan became his trademarks.

Fire, twice

In 1914, a worker set fire to the living quarters and killed seven people, including Borthwick. Wright rebuilt. In 1925, an electrical fire tore through the house, and he rebuilt again.

He never really stopped working on it. Over nearly five decades he and his apprentices kept adding and changing things, and the estate grew to include a studio, a school and a working farm. Starting in 1937, Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship spent winters at Taliesin West in Arizona, but Wisconsin stayed home until he died in 1959.

The architecture school Wright founded left Taliesin in 2020. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation owns the property, and Taliesin Preservation, a nonprofit, has cared for it since 1990.

Taliesin is a National Historic Landmark. In 2019 it became one of eight Wright buildings named to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Go see it

All tours start at the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center on County Highway C, which is open daily May through October and on weekends in April and November. The cafe inside is the only Wright-designed restaurant still operating anywhere. Reservations are recommended, and tours are for ages 8 and up.

It’s about an hour west of Madison. Book a house tour, then grab lunch overlooking the river.

For information, visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin