Frank Lloyd Wright Built Taliesin East for His Mistress

Taliesin was a refuge. In 1911, when Frank Lloyd Wright built this house near Spring Green, Wis., where his mother’s family had lived since the Civil War, he was persona non grata in Chicago, and so was the woman for whom he built the house, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They had met in 1903 when Cheney’s husband commissioned Wright to build their new family home in Oak Park, Ill. The house was finished within a year, and Wright and Cheney began an affair. They kept it secret, but in 1909 they left their spouses and embarked on a trip to Europe. 

From “The House that Love Built—Before It Was Gone” by Leanne Shapton and Niklas Maak for The New York Times Magazine, 2016

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