Haddock House, recently brought to life many years after its inception by Taliesin Associated Architects, is a beautifully built, stunningly retro inspired home located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The original design for this house was conceptualized, sketched, and planned by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who had created the image of this innovative home as a one-of-a-kind customized masterpiece for a northern Wisconsin school teacher and friend in 1938. The house, however, was never actually built before Wright passed away.
Forty years after Wright designed the plans for this house, a University of Michigan professor named Frederick Haddock purchased it from Wright’s widow. He then partnered with the architectural firm Taliesin Associated Architects, founded many years earlier by Wright himself to manage his legacy, to bring Wright’s masterpiece to life.
With the help of Taliesin, Haddock chose a 10 acre plot of luscious green lawn and wooded areas sloping gently down towards Honey Creek. This met not only what Haddock wanted, but also the kind of site that Wright’s original design was conceptualized to exist in. Once the house was built, it was named after professor Haddock himself.
Now, Haddock House is a stunning structure with unending visual appeal and lots of artistic angles and texture. It was designed in the style of Wright’s classic Usonian homes, known for their efficient living capabilities and the way they’re built specifically to blend in with their natural surroundings.
Haddock House is build with slanting layers of wood, panels of shining glazed glass, and high ceilings intended to increase feelings of spaciousness even farther that its actual square footage. Personal rooms, like the bedrooms and bathrooms, are designed to appear as cozy and warm as possible, heavily featuring natural woods and materials that follow the aesthetic of blending in with the house’s wooded surroundings.
The rest of the house follows those stunning wooden guidelines too, getting creative with small details like lamps and art pieces that continue the grained theme. In contrast to all that wood, a beautiful space in the garden features a lovely landscape design that nods to traditional Japanese gardens.
Once the house was finished and put up for sale, Haddock made sure to include original drawings and blueprints, as well as letters of authentication from Taliesen Associated Architects. These confirmed to new owners that house was now just a Frank Lloyd Wright design, but a pristinely completed and incredibly unique one-of-a-kind Wright masterpiece.
Photogra11phs by: PlanOmatic
Hello Courtney Constable,
From out of the past comes the builder of the Haddock House, Richard A. (Dick) Russell. I found these photos via a friend in Canada who loves researching architecture. Fred Haddock would not allow me to have the house photographed by a professional photographer.
The Haddock house was a bear to build. Having been designed in the 1930’s, none of the hardware called for existed any longer. I lucked out while visiting an elaborate ship’s store on Lake Erie. Much of the house has “Ship’s hardware”.
We broke ground on the house in October of 1979 and completed the house the following fall of 1980. Essentially a one year build job.
In the process of doing some additional reviews of printed material that related to the sale of the house by Fred Haddock’s widow, I came upon a gross error. Teacher Richard Reinhart is credited with being a supervising architect. No remotely true; Mr. Reinhart was teacher at a nearby community college. He came by occasionally to take photos to show to his architectural class. The supervising architect was Charles Montooth from the Wright studios at Taliesin.