One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rare Usonian Automatic Homes Achieves Landmark Status
The Kalil House, located in Manchester, New Hampshire, is one of only seven Usonian Automatics in the country
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A concrete house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for a New Hampshire couple near the end of his life has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources announced that the Kalil House, located in Manchester, New Hampshire, had been added to the register on October 1. Run by the National Park Service, the register identifies places of historical importance for preservation.
The Kalil House is a Usonian Automatic home, a short-lived design that Wright created for middle-class families seeking high-quality housing. The houses were constructed from differently shaped concrete blocks designed by Wright, and he hoped that homeowners would eventually be able to build such houses themselves.
The idea didn’t catch on. Usonian Automatics proved a lot more expensive and difficult to execute than Wright had intended, even when professional builders got involved. In the end, only seven of the 20 that Wright designed were actually built, including the Manchester house.
Quick fact: Frank Lloyd Wright’s unfinished projects
While the famed architect designed more than 1,000 structures, fewer than half were actually built.
Wright was commissioned by Toufic Kalil, a Lebanese-born physician who worked in medical radiation therapy, and his wife, Mildred. They were inspired by their neighbors three houses down, the Zimmermans, who had commissioned Wright for a classic Usonian house, a low-lying structure made of natural materials like brick, wood and glass. The Usonian Automatic was a variation on the Usonian style, which was one of Wright’s major designs.
The Kalils were “surprised” when they saw what Wright had designed for them, their nephew, Steven Kalil, told Todd Bookman of New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) in 2019. “They were expecting [a design like the Zimmermans’ house] and saw this,” Kalil said. “And they were like, whoa.”
The home’s cost also came as a surprise. While construction was estimated to cost $25,000, it ultimately cost $75,000. The Kalil House was built by professionals, who had to move concrete blocks that weighed between 80 and 240 pounds—more than 150 tons in total, per a statement from the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources.
In the end, the Kalil House stayed in the original owners’ family longer than any other Usonian Automatic. Toufic lived there until 1990, per NHPR. Then, Toufic’s younger brother John moved in and lived there until 2018, when he died at 101.
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In 2019, Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art was able to nab the Kalil House off the market through an anonymous donation of $970,000, the Art Newspaper’s Nancy Kenney reported at the time. Today, both the Kalil House and the Zimmerman House are owned by the Currier Museum of Art and are open to the public.
The Kalil House “retains an extremely high level of integrity,” says the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources, noting that it has been preserved incredibly well since it was completed in 1957. There have been no major alterations or restorations over the past seven decades, and the interior still has nearly all of Wright’s original fixtures and furniture, including his lamps, rugs and kitchen appliances.
The house features two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and an L-shaped living room. It also comes with a smaller storage house, which was originally intended to be a guest house. A lot of natural light filters into the house through the windows built into many of the concrete blocks.
“Really, what’s special about this is it’s a time capsule,” Steven Kalil told NHPR.