Samara ( the John E. Christian House) is a Usonian-style historic house museum in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Samara was completed in 1956 for Purdue University professor John E. Christian and his family. The single-story house spans about and uses materials such as brick, concrete, and glass. Its nickname comes from the samara, a type of winged seed that is depicted throughout the house's decorations. The house has been praised over the years for its Usonian-style decorations and is designated as a National Historic Landmark.
Samara occupies a sloping triangular site that spans about . Its landscape decorations include a driveway, lanai, ravine, living-room terrace, and courtyard garden. The facade is made of brick, mahogany, and plate glass. The roof is on two levels, divided by clerestory windows with mahogany boards, and there is a carport extending over the main entrance. The interior uses materials such as brick, concrete, glass, and mahogany and is arranged on a grid of squares. The entrance foyer leads to three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a nursery to the northwest, along with a two-tiered living room to the southeast. The house also includes a dining room to the northeast and a workspace (consisting of a kitchen and laundry room) at the center.
John and his wife Catherine contacted Wright to design the house in 1950, but development took several years because the family was not in a rush to design the house. Design work began in 1953, and construction began in 1955; the family moved in on September 7, 1956. Because of the Christian family's monetary shortfalls, the design was not complete when they moved in, and various architectural elements were added over the decades. John Christian, who began giving tours of Samara in 1988, occupied the house until his death in 2015. Tours continued after John's death, and the house underwent renovations in the early 2020s.
Site Samara, also known as the John E. Christian House, is located at 1301 Woodland Avenue in the Woodland Heights neighborhood of West Lafayette, Indiana, United States. The site is roughly triangular and occupies about . The house is surrounded by other houses, each also occupying about one acre, near the campus of Purdue University. Its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, oriented the house to maintain the existing topography and to take advantage of sunlight.
The parcel slopes down from west to east. There is an elevation change of about between Northwestern Avenue on its southwest border (at the Purdue campus's eastern boundary) and Woodland Avenue on its southeast border. Woodland Avenue, which was originally intended to connect to Northwestern Avenue, dead ends at the house's entrance; the house occupies the right-of-way originally intended for Woodland Avenue. The house is positioned below Northwestern Avenue, allowing noise from traffic to pass above it.
Landscape design Before the house was built, there were about three dozen trees on the property, most of which were evergreens. When Wright designed Samara, he directed the Christian family to add a larger variety of plantings throughout the grounds. The plantings are divided into five zones, which adjoin a driveway, lanai, ravine, living-room terrace, and courtyard garden. Many of the plantings are Asian-inspired. The grounds are illuminated by twelve copper lanterns, which have perforations shaped like the samara, a type of winged seed found in a pinecone.
The entrance driveway from Woodland Avenue is denoted by a custom-designed gate (which is made of iron) and a lamppost. There is a brick planter next to the gate, which has juniper plants and a Philippine-mahogany mailbox. The driveway itself is paved with pinkish brick. It was originally made of gravel, but the original owners, John and Catherine (Kay) Christian, paved the driveway in 1960 based on plans by Wright. The lanai, a grassy area at the northeast corner, is the only curved design element in the house; it is surrounded by a brick wall. The original plans for the lanai included a reflecting pool, which was not installed during the 20th century.
The southern portion of the site includes a ravine, located between the house itself and higher ground to the southeast. The ravine is filled with preexisting evergreen trees, along with plantings the Christians added. At the house's eastern corner is the L-shaped living room terrace, extending outward from the house's floor slab. The terrace is surrounded by a low brick parapet. and is covered by a pergola of steel beams, which are clad with Philippine mahogany and are supported by Cherokee-red poles. There is also a triangular courtyard garden, which is level with the house and is surrounded by trees.
Architecture Samara was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Usonian style and opened in 1956. The house's nickname comes from the samara's winged seed. Motifs of winged seeds (samarae) were placed throughout the house, including in the clerestory windows, dining chairs, living room rug, and lamps. The house also incorporates over 40 design details that are shared by Wright's other houses. Among these are Usonian design elements such as a flat roof, a carport, and terraces, as well as recessed illumination and underfloor heating. Samara is one of a few major examples of contemporary architecture in West Lafayette, along with the Purdue State Bank, designed by Wright's mentor Louis Sullivan.
Both the exterior and interior are constructed out of red brick and mahogany, since Wright, a proponent of organic architecture, wanted to use natural materials in the design. The use of mahogany was intended to match what Wright described as "the elegance" of Catherine Christian, one of the original owners. The house is arranged around a grid of squares measuring wide. It is built on a concrete floor slab, which is thick and is tinted Cherokee red; this pigment was created by sprinkling powder into the concrete while it was still drying.
The Christian family was not initially able to purchase all of the specified custom details, but they made an agreement with Wright to continue adding to the home as their budget allowed. Many of the decorative details were thus designed so they could be added later on. The Christian family maintained the home according to Wright's exacting specifications.
Exterior
Facade The longest elevations of the facade are to the northwest and southeast. Like other Usonian houses, Samara uses both glass and solid walls in its facade. The brickwork, manufactured nearby in Attica, Indiana, is arranged that only its horizontal joints are recessed; the vertical joints are flush with the brick, but none of the joints are painted. The trim around the windows and doors is made of Philippine mahogany. The mitred glass windows are thick and lack visible vertical mullions at the house's corners, allowing the windows to wrap around the facade.
The northwestern elevation is accessed from Woodland Avenue's dead end. It has a curving driveway from the east, which leads to a carport on the southwestern elevation, measuring two cars wide. The carport's roof is supported on its far end by a standalone brick garden shed. The main doorway is concealed under the carport, occupying the southeastern wall of a protrusion on the house's southwestern elevation. This doorway is flanked by fixed-pane plate glass and movable casement windows, which are the only openings in the solid brick wall.
At the house's northern corner are fixed-pane and casement windows (which wrap around a corner), along with full-height glass doors. The northeastern elevation is mostly clad in horizontally arranged bricks and has a wide central section, flanked by recessed step-backs in the wall. These step-backs create corners that abut the guest room, master bedroom, and dining room from north to south. The dining room, at the center of the northeastern elevation, has a plate-glass door and wrap-around window. The easternmost portion of the northeastern elevation (adjacent to the dining room), along with the southeastern elevation, are connected by a wrap-around glass window. Both elevations have full-height doors and windows made of plate glass, which open onto the lanai and terrace. The southeastern wall is interrupted by two load-bearing horizontally-patterned brick walls.
Roof The roof is supported by steel beams, some of which are embedded into the glass walls. Its eaves protrude significantly from the facade and are clad with off-white gypsum board and plaster on their soffits, or undersides. These eaves allowed sunlight to warm the house during the winter, when the sun was low in the sky, while shading the house during the summer, when the sun was higher. The surface of the roof consists of tar and pitch with white marble gravel, which was intended to carry rainwater toward drains at each corner. Wright did not add downspouts below the roof, since he wanted water to cascade downward in warmer weather and freeze up in colder weather.
Parts of the roof are raised above the main roof, and clerestory windows with Philippine mahogany trim are inserted between the two levels. Both sides of each clerestory window contain Philippine mahogany screens with samara-shaped perforations. The boards each measure across and have mitered corners, allowing them to be placed on both sides of the wrap-around corner windows. Similarly patterned screens were used on the Bachman–Wilson House, another Wright-designed Usonian home. The clerestory windows themselves allowed the house to be ventilated naturally.
The edges of the roof have a decorative fascia made of copper. The upper roof's fascia dates from 1960, while the fascia for the rest of the roof was not added until 1991, replacing the original wood fascia. The copper fascia consists of interlocking rectangular panels and embossed geometric shapes, which create a textured sawtooth-like motif. These motifs cast differently-shaped shadows depending on the time of day. Although it typically took 20 to 30 years for a fascia to weather to a blue-green patina, Wright wanted the weathering to be accelerated, so John Christian devised a copper sulfate mixture to achieve this.
Interior
The house spans about and uses materials such as brick walls, concrete floors, glass windows, and mahogany trim. The floor slab is scored, with grooves denoting the floor grid. Embedded under the floor slab is a gravity heating system with copper pipes; this system is more intricate than similar systems at Wright's other Usonian buildings. The pipes in Samara's gravity heating system are spaced apart at the house's perimeter and twice that distance in other parts of the house.
Wright specified or designed the furniture and furnishings inside. The living and dining rooms originally contained mass-produced chairs and tables designed by Wright and made by the Heritage-Henredon Company, though Wright also created custom furniture, which the Christians constructed gradually. Wright picked the house's drapery patterns, which came from a design line he had designed for the F. Schumacher Company. He also designed the tableware and cutlery, including porcelains with multicolored motifs to hide lipstick stains. Wright devised other objects such as wastebaskets, planters, candlesticks, and curtains. Items such as a five-tiered lamp are inspired by pinecone motifs. Wright concealed the house's televisions because he felt they were unattractive, and he designed movable television trays.