The Goetsch–Winckler House is a single-family home at 2410 Hulett Road in Okemos, Michigan, United States. Designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright for the art professors Alma Goetsch and Kathrine Winckler, it was completed in 1940. The house, an early example of Wright's Usonian homes, is a single-story structure laid out in a straight line and oriented west-northwest to east-southeast. The Goetsch–Winckler House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The massing is composed of several offset rectangular spaces accessed by a carport to the southeast. The facade is made of brick, along with boards and battens. There are also bands of clerestory windows at the tops of the facade, in addition to full-height French doors and casement windows. The house is topped by two levels of overhanging flat roofs with protruding eaves. The interior, spanning no more than , is centered around an open plan living–dining room. There are two bedrooms and a bathroom to the northwest, a kitchen to the southeast, and a small cellar. In addition, the house has built-in furniture designed by Wright, as well as redwood and brick walls, plywood ceilings, concrete floors, and fir trim. Outside the western corner of the house is a lanai.
In 1938, several Michigan State University professors formed a co-op and bought a 40-acre (16 ha) tract in Okemos, where they intended to develop a community called Usonia II. Wright designed houses for each member of the co-op, including a single house for Goetsch and Winckler, but the co-op plans failed when the members could not obtain financing. The women bought another site in Okemos in early 1940 and hired Wright to construct his design for them on the new site. After the house was finished, Goetsch and Winckler expressed satisfaction at the house's design and often hosted events there. The women moved to Arkansas in 1965, and the house was resold multiple times afterward, falling into disrepair. The Seidman family bought the house in 2007 and restored it. Nathan Meyer bought the house in 2023, and he opened the house to the public for Airbnb bookings and limited tours the next year.
Description The Goetsch–Winckler House occupies the central portion of a triangular, site at 2410 Hulett Road in Okemos, Michigan, United States. One of Wright's earliest Usonian homes, the Goetsch–Winckler House was designed for Alma Goetsch and Kathrine Winckler, two art professors who worked at Michigan State University. It is one of four buildings that Frank Lloyd Wright designed near Lansing, Michigan. The house retains most of its original design, with some minor changes over the years.
The house is an "in-line Usonian"—literally a house built in a straight line. This layout is similar to "L"- or "T"-shaped Usonian designs like the Herbert and Katherine Jacobs First House, but they lack an additional wing. The layout was necessitated by the fact that the house sits on a ridge. The house is oriented roughly west-northwest to east-southeast, since the site slopes slightly upward to the northeast and more sharply downward to the southwest. The access driveway, made of crushed stone, leads to a carport on the southeastern side of the house. Shrubbery and a parking area abut the building to the southwest, while a lawn with flowers on its perimeter abuts it to the northwest. The house is surrounded by trees except near its driveway, obscuring the views of neighboring low-rise houses.
Exterior The structure is one story tall; it sits on a concrete slab and, like other Usonian houses, has no full basement. The massing is composed of several offset rectangular massings. The living–dining and kitchen spaces are located in the center of the building, with the carport to the southeast and the bedroom wing to the northwest. Outside the western corner of the building is a lanai, or open-air veranda. The lanai occupies a corner between the house's living–dining and bedroom wings and is surrounded by a board-and-batten parapet. Originally paved in grass, the lanai was subsequently remodeled with a concrete pavement composed of squares.
Facade The outer walls are generally made of brick. On some parts of the facade, the brick walls are clad with horizontally arranged redwood boards, which are separated by sunken battens. When the house was built, the boards were left unpainted so they could be exposed to the elements, but they had been painted in a putty color by the 1990s. There are bands of clerestory windows at the tops of the facade, which were intended to prevent pockets of air from accumulating on the rooms' ceilings. These decorative features were all intended to emphasize the horizontal orientation of the facade.
The southeast elevation of the facade includes the carport, which does not have any windows; the carport wall wraps around the southern corner of the facade. At the eastern corner of the house is a chimney made of red brick, as well as a kitchen wall made of the same material. The primary elevation of the facade is to the northeast, where a walkway from the carport runs along the facade, connecting with a French door to the living–dining room. The walkway, a continuation of the house's concrete-slab foundation, ends at a brick parapet next to the French door. The northern sections of the house's northeast and northwest elevations have a board-and-batten facade, which adjoins one of the bedrooms.
The western corner of the facade, adjoining the lanai, is composed of a solid wall flanked by perforated wall sections. Each perforated wall section consists of battens but lacks the corresponding boards. There are French doors leading to the lanai from both the living–dining room and bedrooms. The southwest elevation has several vertical casement windows abutting the living room, which face a brick planter. To support the concrete foundation slab, there are several horizontal brick courses beneath the southern elevation of the house.
Roof
The house is topped by two levels of overhanging flat roofs with protruding eaves; the soffits, or bottom surfaces of the eaves, are made of plywood. The bedroom, kitchen, and entrance areas have a lower roof, while the living–dining room has a higher roof. The roof is made of a system of overlapping joists measuring across. The house's carport is covered by a cantilevered canopy extending above the driveway, which extends beyond the nearest wall. (S.269) When the house was built, a trellis was cantilevered above the lanai along the building's southwest elevation, but this trellis has since been removed. In addition, the flat roofs were originally ineffective in draining water, prompting later owners to give it a slight pitch, or slope.
Interior The house is cited as having a floor area of or approximately . In general, the interiors consist of redwood wall planks and concrete floors, though the house also has fir trim and red-brick fireplace walls. The interior partition walls are made of board-and-batten siding, which is laid horizontally and is composed of plywood sheets with tarpaper between them. The floor is made of concrete and is divided into a grid of squares. The house is heated by a radiant heating system, which consists of hot-water pipes embedded into the floor slab; the radiant-heating system eliminated the need for radiators. There is a small cellar under the living room, which contains the boiler room and some storage space. The ceiling is clad in oiled plywood and has indirect lighting fixtures. The original plans called for the ceilings to be clad in redwood, but the general contractor, Harold Turner, swapped out the materials during construction.
Wright installed built-in furniture throughout the rooms to make the building appear larger than it actually was. The built-in furniture includes the dining table, a bar, a desk and bookcase in the workspace, and storage spaces. Some of the furniture that Wright designed for the house was not built, including panels for the clerestory, built-in beds, and all except two of the chairs that he designed for the house's studio. Goetsch designed the original curtains for the house. The house's floors are painted in red, while the original textiles were decorated in an earthen color palette.
Living–dining room and kitchen At the center of the house is an open plan living–dining room, which contains a dining niche, a foyer, and an art-studio space; the different spaces are delineated by built-in furniture and by changes in the ceiling's height. The room is illuminated by both clerestory windows and casement windows. The southwestern side of the living–dining room has an artists' studio that receives natural light from the large casement windows, which overlook the ravine. The room's other three sides have clerestory windows only at the top of the walls. The living–dining room has a fireplace without a mantelpiece or hearth, and there is a modular dining table and a built-in bench next to it. The dining table protrudes into the living–dining room, which is arranged in a "Z" shape around the table.
Behind the fireplace's chimney is a workspace, which has a low ceiling and occupies an alcove on the living room's southeastern wall. The workspace is bounded by built-in furniture on the southwest and southeast, the chimney on the northeast, and the rest of the living room on the northwest. This space is illuminated by clerestory windows. Another alcove to the northeast was used to store paintings.
The kitchen is at the eastern corner of the house, next to the living room's workspace and separated from the living room by the fireplace. It is surrounded by the house's brick exterior walls and the brick chimney and has a ceiling high. The space receives natural light from clerestory windows atop the walls, in addition to two ceiling skylights. There is a countertop with a stove and sink along the exterior walls, as well as a niche for a refrigerator within the chimney wall. A wall separates the kitchen from the foyer and is topped by a clerestory window.
Bedrooms and bathroom Connecting the living room to the bedrooms is a hallway, which has windows and French doors on its northern wall, as well as closets on the southern wall. The bathroom and the two bedrooms are at the northwest end of the house. The bathroom separates the two bedrooms and has pink hardware, board-and-batten walls, built-in storage areas, and a window facing the lanai. The bedrooms themselves open onto the lanai. The southeast bedroom (next to the living room) is smaller and was built for Alma Goetsch, while the northwest bedroom was built for Kathrine Winckler and has larger, and more numerous, windows. There are built-in storage areas in both rooms and a built-in table in the northwest bedroom. These spaces also have relatively low ceilings of .
History Frank Lloyd Wright mostly designed houses for wealthy clients until the 1930s, With . when he also began to design lower-cost Usonian houses for middle-class families. In general, his Usonian houses tended to have open plans, geometric floor grids, in-floor heating, and a carport, and they lacked a garage or basement. Wright's first-ever Usonian house design had been the Jacobs First House in Madison, Wisconsin, completed in 1937. Prior to the American entry into World War II, Wright had designed numerous other houses around the U.S., including the Goetsch–Winckler House.
Development
Original plans