Rosenbaum House

About this property

The Rosenbaum House is a single-family house designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright and built for Stanley and Mildred Rosenbaum in Florence, Alabama, United States. A noted example of his Usonian house concept, it is the only Wright building in Alabama, and is one of only 26 pre-World War II Usonian houses. Wright scholar John Sergeant called it "the purest example of the Usonian." It is currently a house museum. In 1938 Stanley Rosenbaum (a professor at Florence State Teachers' College, now the University of North Alabama) and his new wife Mildred were given a building lot in Florence, Alabama and funds to build a house on it by Rosenbaum's parents. Both newlyweds had read Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography and a cover story on Wright in Time magazine. They commissioned Wright to design and build the house; it is his only design in Alabama. This is an example of Wright's "Usonian"-style homes, which he intended as low-cost housing for middle-class American families. But the first phase of the house ultimately cost $14,000 (equivalent to $320,000 in 2025), nearly double the wealthy couple's original $7,999 budget. The flat roof leaked almost immediately, the heating system failed, and the Rosenbaum family seldom used the custom furniture built on-site for the home. After the Rosenbaums took up residence in September 1940, the first photographs of the house were exhibited the following month at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City the following month. This house was also the childhood home of notable American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. The house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. It remained in the Rosenbaum family until 1999 (when Mildred Rosenbaum moved into a nursing home). This was a longer period under the original owners' control than that for any of Wright's other Usonian homes. By this time the house was in poor repair, with extensive water penetration and termite damage. The Rosenbaum family donated the house to the City of Florence and at the same time sold the furniture and contents of the house to the city for $75,000. The city spent a further $600,000 on repairs, using original plans in the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation's archive at Taliesin West. Following the restoration, the city opened the house in 2002 as a public museum, the Frank Lloyd Wright Rosenbaum House. The museum displays some of the original Wright-designed furniture. The restoration won the 2004 Wright Spirit Award in the Public Domain from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. Mildred Rosenbaum was the first recipient of the Wright Spirit Award for her tireless efforts for preservation and interpretation through the Frank Lloyd Wright Rosenbaum House Foundation. In her last five years in residence, which ended in 1998, nearly 5,000 visitors received personal tours conducted by Mrs. Rosenbaum, who died in 2006.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Lauderdale County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Lauderdale County.

More historic places in Alabama

Browse all historic places in Alabama.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Alabama history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.