Frank Lloyd Wright house in Kankakee on the market for the first time since 1976

A house in Kankakee that Frank Lloyd Wright designed early in his career, when he was on the cusp of revolutionizing the architecture of our homes, is going up for sale for the first time since the mid-1970s.

Built in 1900 as one of a pair of neighboring houses Wright designed for Warren Hickox and his sister Anna Hickox Bradley and their spouses, the house “fits into a turning point for Wright,” said John Waters, preservation programs manager at the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings Conservancy.

At 33 years old, Wright was “working towards the simplicity and clarity” of the modern homes he would soon design, Waters said, but the architect hadn’t yet let go of Victorian homes’ steep pitched roofs.

Yet it’s unmistakably Wright’s work on the outside, with several broad overhanging roofs, their undersides lined with plaster and concentric banding, and many of its windows imprinted with a geometric pattern in the leading.

The house, on Harrison Avenue in a neighborhood of handsome vintage homes, has been in the hands of the Brown family since 1976, when they moved to Kankakee from Evanston, 74 miles north. It hits the market March 14, priced at $779,000 and represented by Victoria Krause Schutte of @properties Christie’s International Realty.

Set on about three-fifths of an acre, the house is four bedrooms in about 3,300 square feet above ground, with a big basement.

Wright designed a hexagonal line pattern for the windows and then put them in two roughly hexagonal spaces, this one on the house’s east side and a mirror image on the west, with the living room in between.

“That pattern floats across the walls inside” as the sun moves up through the sky, said Jennifer St. Clair, who was 15 when the Browns, her parents, bought the house.

Jim Brown was working for Roper, an appliance manufacturer, and commuted to Kankakee from Evanston for a few years before getting tired of it. Fortuitously, the Wright house came on the market at about the same time, making it easy for his wife, Eve, who like him was a devotee of older homes, to commit to moving, St. Clair said. She’s not sure what her parents paid for the house.

The ample woodwork on the interior had mostly been painted white, as it’s seen here, before the Browns’ tenure, St. Clair said.

The Browns had woodwork in the living room stripped of paint to bring back the natural finish Wright started with.

On the right is a set of art glass doors that originally opened to a large terrace that faces the other Wright house on the block. At some point before the Browns it was taken down and replaced with a small enclosed porch.

This photo doesn’t quite capture the sunny breadth and openness of this main space in the house. It's three connected spaces: a wide living room with windows and doors along the south and the two hexagons on east and west, one seen in an earlier photo and the other, nearly identical but painted yellow, at the bottom of this story.

Wright designed “an elegant space,” Waters said. “Very light” despite what would have been significantly more dark wood.

The tall brick fireplace is an element that would come to be more decorative in later Wright homes, with inglenook benches, brick arches and other artful details.

That’s not to suggest this fireplace is somehow lesser. With brick pillars between flanking plaster walls, it’s a handsome centerpiece of the space.

The original wood floors are all intact beneath the carpeting, and in some spaces upstairs it’s been pulled up to reveal the rich Georgia pine.

Glimpses of the two hexagonal spaces are at opposite ends, and just to the right of the fireplace is a charming space Wright reportedly liked to use when he was in the house.

Wright called the inviting nook near the front door his “social office,” according to Paul St. Clair, the Browns’ son-in-law. With two houses underway here on Harrison Street and a growing clientele, the ambitious young architect would bring potential customers down to Kankakee to see his work and, while here, settle in the nook to confer with them.

Sitting there, he could show them his use of art glass and wood trim (it would have been natural then, not white), not to mention a long view from those benches across the living room to more windows and, beyond, another house of his design and the Kankakee River.

The turned spindles screening this nook and the staircase were also in the hexagonal rooms, at a smaller size. Wood screens show up in many later Wright homes, often with simpler shapes than these.

Although Jennifer St. Clair and her sister didn’t grow up in this house, she had a few teenaged years in it. Her bedroom faced east, with an uninterrupted view along the adjacent street.

“The sunrise comes in through that window,” she recalled, “and at night car lights coming down the street would play off the leaded glass. It was a nice show.” It's likely Wright anticipated the effect of the sunrise, but not the effect of the headlights.

The Browns’ house is at left, built in 1900 for Warren Hickox and his wife, Laura, and facing another Wright house, built the same year for Warren’s sister Anna Hickox Bradley and her husband, B. Harley Bradley.

Immediately to the right of the Bradley house is the Kankakee River, bending around the neighborhood. It’s also visible from the Hickox house looking west, about a block beyond where the photographer stood to take this photo.

Now an arts and education center open to the public, the Bradley house has a history that includes a sordid chapter in the 1980s.

Prior to that, when the Browns moved in next door, the Bradley house was operating as a restaurant. Its patrons, St. Clair said, were among the people who would wander onto the Browns’ property, and sometimes right up onto the porch, to check out the Wright architecture.

“My mother wanted this to be our family home,” St. Clair said. “I think that’s why she didn’t allow tours” and other public visitations to the house over the past five decades. That’s why there were few, if any, photos of the interior online in its listing.

This photo shows the boxy little porch, the uninspired replacement for an original terrace that reached out from the house with the same grace as the roofs.

Rebuilding that terrace is one of several possibilities that face the next owner. Another is the kitchen, last updated sometime before the Browns bought the house.

A new kitchen could be larger than this, incorporating some of the neighboring spaces, such as the breakfast room seen beyond the doorway.

Because those spaces are available and don’t really speak of Wright anymore, Waters said, “you can put in a new kitchen without undermining the architectural integrity of the house.”

Utilities are all in working order, according to the home’s listing agent, although they’re decades old. While she, the sellers and Waters all say the house is entirely livable as is, it’s most likely a buyer will opt to have some or all of the work done to bring the house fully into the 21st century.

Also ready for new ideas: the basement, complete with antique formica floor next to a 1950s-esque bar that isn’t seen in this photo. An advantage down here is that the basement was built at full height, unlike some vintage homes. Digging out the floor isn’t needed.

This house and the one next door went up 124 years ago, during what Waters says was “a fertile year for Wright.”

Wright had left Louis Sullivan’s architecture office seven years earlier to set up his own shop and had designed some artful homes, including the Winslow house in River Forest and the Heller house in Hyde Park.

As the 19th century dissolved into 1900, Waters says, “Wright was busy.” He designed the Kankakee pair, a house in West Pullman with roof lines that look like an early draft of those on this house, and a house in Beverly.

All of those, Waters suggests, helped Wright get to the next step, “his first mature Prairie design,” the Ward Willits house built in Highland Park in 1902.

If so, that makes the house he designed for the Hickox family, which has been stewarded for half a century by the Brown family, an important bridge for what was to come from Wright.