Edwin H. Cheney House (1903) located in

Oak Park, Illinois Oak Park is a village in Cook County, Illinois, adjacent to Chicago. It is the 29th-most populous municipality in Illinois with a population of 54,583 as of the 2020 U.S. Census estimate. Oak Park was first settled in 1835 and later incorporated in ...

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, was

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...

's design of this residence for electrical engineer

Edwin Cheney Edwin Henry Cheney (June 13, 1869 - December 18, 1942) was an American electrical engineer from Oak Park, Illinois, United States. Edwin was the son of James Wilson Cheney (b. August 20, 1841) and Armilla Armanda (b. ca. 1846), daughter of Linus ...

. The house is part of the Frank Lloyd Wright–Prairie School of Architecture Historic District. A brick house with the living and sleeping rooms all on one floor under a single hipped roof, the Cheney House has a less monumental and more intimate quality than the design for the

Arthur Heurtley House The Arthur B. Heurtley House is located in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, United States. The house was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright and constructed in 1902. The Heurtley House is considered one of the earliest examples of a ...

. The intimacy of the Cheney house is due to the building not being a full story off the ground and being sequestered from the main street by a walled terrace. In addition, its windows are nestled between the wide eaves of the roof and the substantial stone sill that girdles the house. The living rooms, which take up the entire front of the house and open onto the walled terrace at the center, are trimmed in fir. Together they form a single longitudinal space under a continuous ceiling carried up in the form of a hip roof, the whole subdivided into dining room, living room, and library by wooden posts and cabinets. The basement features a large in-law suite. It was this commission that precipitated the love affair between Wright, and Edwin's wife, Mamah Cheney (né Borthwick), the climax of which occurred in 1909 when Wright abandoned his architectural practice and left with Mrs. Cheney for a year in Europe. This era of Wright's life ended in 1914 when the former Mrs. Cheney (by then divorced, and legally Mamah Borthwick), her children, and four others, were murdered at

Taliesin Taliesin ( , ; 6th century AD) was an early Brittonic poet of Sub-Roman Britain whose work has possibly survived in a Middle Welsh manuscript, the '' Book of Taliesin''. Taliesin was a renowned bard who is believed to have sung at the courts ...

by an insane servant.

Notes

References

* Storrer, William Allin. ''The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion''. University of Chicago Press, 2006, (S.104) {{DEFAULTSORT:Cheney House Houses completed in 1903 Frank Lloyd Wright buildings Oak Park, Illinois Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie School of Architecture Historic District Houses in Cook County, Illinois Historic district contributing properties in Illinois Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Cook County, Illinois