“As the home was originally a summer residence, and one Wright’s earliest independent commissions, we wanted to know more about the Bagley family,” Bachrach tells AD over email. The pair found that Grace Bagley, the matriarch of the family, was an important social reformer through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Craine’s Chicago Business, she was active in the women’s suffrage movement, a frequent volunteer at Jane Addams Hull House (a settlement house that served European immigrants), and made improvements for tenants to an apartment building her husband owned. While unconfirmed, it’s likely that Wright met the Bagleys at All Souls Unitarian Church, where they were members. The paster there, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, was the architect’s uncle. Wright also worked on the church during his time at Joseph Lyman Silsbee. In 1894, the couple, who shared Wright’s progressive ideologies, hired him to design them a summer home outside of Chicago.
The other half of the connection took place six years later, when Stephen A. Foster, an attorney, and his wife, Almeda, hired Wright to design them their own vacation property in the West Pullman neighborhood of Chicago. But it wasn’t just a shared use that the two houses had in common. While digging through the Bagley’s life, the researchers found that Almeda and Grace were actually sisters. Both women, born with the surname Hodge, had taken their husband’s names, muddying the connection between them and their two homes. “In the past it was much more difficult to find information on the wives of Wright’s clients,” Bachrach adds.
Both properties are very clearly early Wright. That is to say, to the untrained eye, they don’t look much like Frank Lloyd Wright designs at all. The Bagley House is designed in the Dutch Colonial Revival style and features a dormered gambrel roof and columned veranda. The Foster House, though more experimental, is defined by wood siding and a dormer roof. However, both properties do reveal a designer eager to innovate, who, likely constrained to clients’ tastes and financially unable to pass over commissions, did what he could to push the boundaries. The Bagley House, for example, includes an octagonal library, open floor plan, and glass doors that open onto the veranda, which appear frequently in later Wright homes. The Foster House, for its part, features an outward flare on the edges of both the dormers and the roof, suggesting a Japanese influence, something Wright would continue to explore throughout his career.
