A carpet resource

Magazine Antiques, August, 2003 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Over the course of his long and prolific career, Frank Lloyd Wright designed hundreds of buildings and their interior embellishments, from stained-glass windows to furniture, lighting fixtures, wall coverings, and textiles. The archives of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, are a testament to his enormous output, for they contain more than one hundred thousand letters and twenty-one thousand drawings. Never bashful, Wright also granted hundreds of interviews, delivered lectures, and published articles and books about his work and aesthetic philosophy Because he was concerned about the appearance of his interiors down to the last drawer pull, it is not surprising that he had strong opinions about the textiles he designed. lie wrote that "Floor coverings and hangings are at least as much a part of the house as the plaster on the walls or the tiles on the roof."

His adherence to this edict is apparent in his correspondence with the noted textile designer Loja Saarinen, who ran the weaving workshop at the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit. He asked her to weave the carpets for the Pittsburgh office of one of his most ardent patrons, Edgar J. Kauflnann. (The office is now installed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.) In a letter to Eliel Saarinen, Wright outlined what he had in mind for the carpet he had designed: "We want only a very good substantial fabric--all wool.... The yellow is the yellow of the jacket she [Loja Saarinen] was wearing and that I mentioned as just the colour."

In his own lifetime Wright entered into agreements with sever- al fabric firms to manufacture and market his designs for textiles and carpets. Today, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has licensing agreements with several manufacturers, one of which, Costikyan Carpets, makes carpets to designs from the Wright archives. Costikyan was founded in 1886, at about the time Wright was embarking on his architectural career in the office of Louis Sullivan. The founder, S. Kent Costikyan, moved the firm from Rochester, New York, to New York City in 1900. Today Costikyan Carpets makes carpets in twenty-nine Wright designs. They are hand-woven in Nepal from wool or wool and silk The firm maintains showrooms around the country and may be contacted at 800-247-7847 or through their Web site (www.costikyan.com).