Rollin Furbeck House
- Architect
- Frank Lloyd Wright
- Year
- 1898
- Style
- Prairie School
- City
- Chicago, IL
- Collection
- wright’s chicago
The Rollin Furbeck House, built in 1897 for Rollin and Elizabeth Furbeck, is a 5,000-square-foot, three-story Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park that broke from his earlier square or rectangular plans with a cruciform layout. It's part of the Frank Lloyd Wright-Prairie School of Architecture Historic District, and the Furbecks lived there only until 1899; the Abrahamson family, owners since 1998, listed the house for sale in 2025.
the building
Cruciform plan and a center tower. Wright arranged the house on a cruciform plan, a departure from the square and rectangular footprints of his earlier work, anchored by a three-story center tower and octagonal columns — an early experiment with the vertical massing he kept refining afterward.
Details toward a Prairie vocabulary. The house previews ideas Wright reused for years: matching design details repeated across different stories, simple geometric shapes, a serpentine path to the front entrance, and colonnettes shielding textured diamond-paned windows. Inside, five bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms (two more in the attic) are lit by large amounts of natural light and finished with extensive woodwork.
the style
The Furbeck House sits within the Frank Lloyd Wright-Prairie School of Architecture Historic District and shows Wright working toward his mature Prairie vocabulary, using it to test vertical massing and repeated ornamental details he carried into later houses.
More on Prairie Schoolthe architect
Wright designed the Furbeck House in 1897, using it to test cruciform planning and vertical massing ideas that fed into his mature Prairie School work.
More on Frank Lloyd Wrightsignificance
The house is a National Register of Historic Places contributing property within the Frank Lloyd Wright-Prairie School of Architecture Historic District.
more by Frank Lloyd Wright
nearby
- Edwin H. Cheney House
- Charles E. Roberts Stable
- George Furbeck House
- Harrison P. Young House
- Oscar B. Balch House
- Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio