Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kalil House Wins Landmark Status
77Oct. 18, 2025
TheKalil Housein Manchester, New Hampshire, a Usonian Automatic home designed byFrank Lloyd Wright, has been added to theNational Register of Historic Placesby the US Secretary of the Interior. Completed in 1957 as a private residence and currently owned by theCurrier Museum of Art, the home is just one of seven Usonian Automatic houses built by Wright and embodies his ambition to design affordable, high-quality housing for middle-class Americans.
Wright was commissioned to build the home in 1954 by Toufic and Mildred Kalil, who had admired the residence he’d built for their neighbors Isadore and Lucille Zimmerman. Zimmerman House, which also belongs to the Currier Museum, is an example of Usonian architecture pioneered by Wright featuring horizontal lines, modest dimensions, and open floor plans, and incorporating natural materials such as wood, stone, and brick. He drew on the style for Usonian Automatic architecture, in which the use of interlocking cast concrete blocks reinforced with steel rods was meant to allow people to fabricate and build their own homes.
The Kalil House is composed of 2,580 blocks together weighing more than 150 tons and set in a single-story configuration atop a poured-concrete slab floor. Originally estimated to cost $25,000, the dwelling cost $75,000 to build. It has undergone no alterations or major restorations and is the best-preserved of all the Usonian Automatic homes. As well, it retains its original interior mahogany doors and paneling, as well as much of its Wright-designed furniture, comprising built-ins, shelves, and lamps. Also on the property is a small guesthouse that remains unfinished. The structure is the only original outbuilding designed to accompany a Usonian Automatic home and reflects the same design as Kalil House itself. Both Kalil House and Zimmerman House are open to the public.