"Sondern-Adler House" Table by Frank Lloyd Wright

The Sondern-Adler House, an historic residence designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939, was built in 1940 (next door to painter Thomas Hart Benton's home!) in a leafy suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. The house was originally fitted with custom-made furniture also designed by Wright, including this exquisite table made of old-growth tidewater cypress -- the same kind of wood that the inside and outside of the Sondern-Adler House itself was built from. Noted for its durability as well as its beauty, this species of cypress in native to the American South, and was much favored by Frank Lloyd Wright in his custom furniture during the post-war period.

This table, a minimalist reduction of "table-ness" that brings to mind the similarly slab-based furniture works of Donald Judd, also evokes the powerful form and proportions of a Japanese Shinto torii (鳥居) gate. The torii would have been most familiar to Wright, even unconsciously insistent upon his imagination, as the architect was a great Japanophile from his earliest awakenings as an aesthete (the young Wright's very first travel outside America was to Japan, not to Europe, and he visited and worked in Japan throughout a long career).

The figured grain of the cypress wood on the table is lovely, as is the general condition of the piece.

PROVENANCE: This table was owned by collector of architecture & design (and famous entrepreneur) Thomas S. Monaghan before he sold it, along with much of his collection, at Christie's New York in June, 1993 (lot 123). It was most recently in a private collection in Virginia.

REFERENCE: Storrer, William Allin. The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion. University Of Chicago Press, 2006. (S.279 and S.307)