Manitoga: The Russel Wright Design Center

You arrive at Manitoga (and I thought I had to drive all the way to Winnipeg!) by a steep drive and park outside a tiny visitor’s center where they show a video and sell crockery. I tried to watch the video from the doorway of the crowded room, but the docents kept tapping me on the shoulder with inane questions and suggestions that I climb over people to get a seat (Do I appear ready to faint?), so I took a short walk up one of the hiking trails (by the way — not sure how a guide can be «amazing» — the only reasons I can think of would be swiftly removed by the censors) so never saw the video. That’s OK; some snowy evening by the fire, I’ll watch it online, free of demands for the make and model of my vehicle.
Video finished, up the hill you go. Keep your voices down and be careful not to make eye contact with the house along the path because, although it used to be owned by the Wrights, it’s now in private hands. Reading between the lines: «THAT should have been our Visitor’s Center, dammit, instead of that pathetic little hut.»
The setting of the house and studio, an old quarry, is impressive. Lush and woody, the Hudson Valley’s natural environment at its best. You even see (if you went today) a couple of Lady’s Slipper orchids in bloom. Wow. Much mention is made of the experience the Wrights were trying to create for their visitors, the power they wielded to manipulate their environment, and how everything had to be «just so.» On the long approach to the house, a hilly pathway that climbs around the quarry itself, abundant with Mountain Laurel, ferns, waterfall and moss, soothes the visitor. The tour guide puts so much emphasis on the experience of the senses you forget that you were enjoying the walk and begin to feel guilty about all the subtleties your sensibilities are too crude to appreciate.
Lots of pretentious cliches, liberally peppered with «sort of» and «kind of» (wasn’t this docent convinced of what she was saying?) and finally you arrive at the studio. (Still no house. The bigger the build-​up, the bigger the payoff better damn well be!) Some hints at Philip Johnson’s Glass House here, with its open feeling. A warm treatment of surfaces, innovative at the time, comprise this small gem of a building. The non-​conventional juxtaposition of natural and industrial materials is a Wright trademark; it’s wonderfully successful in this intimate studio. Then the tour guide oh-​so-​vaguely hints a homosexual living arrangement, concluding her statement with a facial expression probably not unfamiliar to those who administer colonoscopies. I checked my watch. Yep, it’s 2015.
On to the main house, with its dramatic waterfall (they re-​directed a stream to accomplish this) nearby. Was this a knockoff of Frank Lloyd Wright’s (there’s that name again) Falling Water? Nah, everybody likes water and horizontal houses. The house clings to the hillside, nestled into it, with steel and glass jutting from the rock. The roof is planted with low sedum. The painted color of the steel is said to blend with the surrounding rock, but it’s cooler, perhaps intentionally. Inside the modestly-​sized main house is a jumble of rooms furnished with boulders that plunges steeply to a living room with a spectacular view and decidedly Flintstones feel. Don’t go into the kitchen; it’s unrestored and dumpy. You step out onto the patio and tiptoe across a path of stones, then back down the hill (Shhhh…) on a more direct route to your car. Before you leave, you’re cornered and subjected to a harangue about the financial woes of maintaining such an important house; presumably the fact that you just shelled out $ 20 to walk through it isn’t good enough.

Among all the historic houses and all the garden tours in the area, this one stands out. The property and the home are unique. It’s well worth the effort to make reservations in advance. Hard to describe being in the presence of a master designer’s creation. Just go see it for yourself.

I did not tour the house, but the hiking trails were great and I had an amazing guide.

I really really really wanted to love this place, but the website made it seem like it was soooooooooo much more than what it was. This place should be memorialized, for it is a beautiful and wonderful testament to a designer who changed the way Americans thought about design for their homes.
Russel Wright dinnerware and furniture were groundbreaking at the time of their release and became the most popular dinnerware and furniture for every day living by the early 1960s. Wright was to Bloomingdale’s what Mizrahi is to Target today. So yes, he does deserve praise for innovative and creative housewares and home accessory design.
The home though, is in great disrepair, and the tour they offer, though thorough in Wright’s history, is not terribly impressive. It’s a little strange, paying to walk around someone’s home which is filled with relics of the past, and thinking, that the place is only open because someone frittered away the fortune and now they’re trying to salvage a legacy lost. I know it sounds cynical, but the feeling I got after spending three hours there was not one of awe and inspiration, but rather, one of sadness and shame. But that’s all subjective…
The quantifiable facts are these:
It’s tough to find; the driving directions on the website were wrong.
When you get there, you think you are lost because there is no real parking. So you wind up parking on the grass near the side entrance.
It’s just a house — there aren’t as many design artifacts as they lead you to believe on the website.
They show you a video to pitch giving and purchasing books from them for 20 minutes in an annex building on the property with a dingy bathroom (think campsite dingy) which they suggest you use before touring the grounds because there isn’t another public restroom there.
You hike the grounds and they show you all of the beautiful vistas of the property and then tell you that this was where Russel Wright would sit and think about his next great design or the love of his life for whom he built the home — completed after her untimely death from breast cancer when they were very young — and you wonder how many poor suckers actually believe that he deliberately put that several ton boulder in that spot just because the light there at 4pm every day between March and June reminded him of his one true love. Like they know!
They never talked about his male lovers or the company he kept at the home in his later years. Who knew this could be such a taboo subject — it must be kept off the radar for the sake of the center’s underwriters.
All in all, this place is very interesting, but the price is too high to warrant the trip unless you are just really into American and Danish Modern design of the late 1950s. Since I am a bit of a junkie for this, I was fine with paying for the trip, but don’t go out of your way.
S~
Additional Information:
House & Landscape Tours
May through October
Most weekdays at 11am
Saturdays and Sundays at 11am and 1:30pm
Advance reservations are required for all tours.