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For over a decade, I’ve intermittently checked sales listings for Frank Lloyd Wright homes with the hope of finding one for my very own. It's a pipe dream, as most are way beyond what I can afford and some are never even publicly listed—like Marc Jacobs’s Hoffman House in Rye, New York, which is presently featured in Vogue’s December 2024 issue, or the Goetsch-Winckler House in Okemos, Michigan, which was purchased in a private deal by a couple of young Wright enthusiasts in 2022.
I’ve been lucky enough to visit a number of Wright homes—Fallingwater, Kentuck Knob, and Boulter House among them—but I’ve never overnighted in one. So, when Goetsch-Winckler’s new owners decided to open up the home to short-term rentals last month (for the very first time in its 85-year history), I was the first one to book a stay.
The house, like most remaining Wright properties, is named after its original commissioners: Alma Goetsch and Kathrine Winckler, who worked at nearby Michigan State University as art professors. On check-in day, I flew from New York to Lansing, Michigan. Okemos is about 25 minutes from the airport, or an hour-and-fifteen-minute drive from Detroit Metro Airport.
I booked pre-Halloween at the height of the fall season, and the cozy, classic American neighborhood unfurled around me as I drove down Hulett Road: ranch houses with SUVs in the driveways, pumpkins on stoops, fall foliage dusting the lawns. Yet as the two-bedroom, one-bathroom Goetsch-Winckler House came into view, it was instantly recognizable, looking nothing like the homes surrounding it—a different kind of American ideal.
Its design is almost nautical—linear in a way that Wright so mastered over the years. Goetsch-Winckler is an example of Wright’s later-career Usonian designs, which were the architect’s vision for easily replicable and affordable middle-class housing in the mid-century. There is no real formal entry, no obvious front door, even. The entrance is a cleverly masked pane of glass within a stretch of windows on the northwestern side of the building (its only giveaway is a lockbox hanging from a discreet knob).
Once inside, the real Wrightian rapture started to sink in. The architecture catches and cleaves light in ways I’ve not seen in another’s work. Goetsch-Winckler House features two long walls of glass on either side of the structure, striated vertically by wooden partitions. As the day passes, shadows trace the earthen-red floors, clock-like in their sweep and complemented by golden beams of light from clerestory windows above the main living area. Replete with many original Wright furniture pieces, the interior feels both lost in time and ahead of the times—minimal, open, but thoroughly and spatially enriched. The bedrooms are small and functional, and smell of antique cedar. I picked Goetsch’s room, the more discreet of the two by design—she had requested the chamber with more “security.”
If you’re a creative, the home’s atmosphere is highly conducive for work. I’m a writer, so I spent my 48 hours at Goetsch-Winckler doing just that, at a near-record pace. In between, I explored the owners’ impressive collection of Wright literature, took dozens of photographs, and tried to take in all of its quirks (Wright’s builds are infamously eccentric). For example, the ceiling in the kitchen, bedrooms, and hallway was remarkably low at just seven feet, and at 6'6", this felt a little close overhead. The living room heated up naturally in the afternoon, but it was recommended that I still set the thermostat to my preferred nighttime temperature by early evening because the radiant floor heating took time to kick in. And in the bathroom, to prevent humidity from damaging the wood, the owners requested that I prop open the window while showering to release steam.
Okemos may not be a typical tourist destination, but it provided a unique window into classic Americana—where the midcentury-modern architecture in Michigan is truly some of the best in the country and the chance to stay at the iconic Goetsh-Winckler house is once in a lifetime.
