The largest of all Frank Lloyd Wright’s living rooms from his early prairie houses has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, far from its original site in the exclusive Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata. There, for almost sixty years, from 1916 until 1972, the Francis W. Little house overlooked the length of Lake Minnetonka on Northome peninsula.

The ghost of what the Little house was appears in old photographs, most vividly in a series of stereopticon photographs of the house and its owners taken shortly after the house was built. Some of them are included in the exhibition of the Museum’s Wright material that accompanies the presentation of the living room.[1] Most of the views seem to have been taken in the autumn. The house spreads low from its knoll, visible through the frieze of tree trunks so congenial to the repeated verticals of Wright’s long window bands. Dried leaves appear here and there on the ground; clusters of them still cling to the almost barren trees. Presumably the annual harvest of autumn leaves and bittersweet must already fill the arts-and-crafts vases and beaten copper bowls inside, the fading colors of the most glorious part of the season enhancing the golds, tans, russets, and browns favored by Wright in his prairie houses.

The big, pavilion-like living room is the heart of the Little house. In the photographs it sits atop the knoll on a brick terrace. Most visible is its hipped roof (Wright’s favorite prairie