Graycliff

Graycliff is a summer estate on a bluff above Lake Erie in the hamlet of Highland-on-the-Lake, about 17 miles southwest of downtown Buffalo, New York. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it in 1926 for Isabelle Reidpath Martin and her husband Darwin D. Martin, a Buffalo businessman who had earlier commissioned Wright's Martin House Complex in the city, and it was built between 1926 and 1931. The complex joins three buildings, the main Martin house, the Foster House that began as a garage with a chauffeur's apartment, and a small Heat Hut, set within about eight and a half acres of gardens and grounds that Wright also shaped. The buildings use stone gathered from the lake's edge, ocher stucco and red cedar shingle roofs, with long horizontal lines, cantilevered balconies and ribbons of windows, and the main house has a glazed central pavilion that lets a visitor see straight through to the water. It is considered one of Wright's most important mid-career works in his Organic Architecture, and the only structure he designed between Taliesin (1925) and Fallingwater (1936) built of stone. After a period as a Piarist school it was bought and restored by the Graycliff Conservancy, and it now operates as a historic house museum, a New York State Landmark and a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.