The Darwin Martin House

I really enjoyed our last excursion to the Darwin Martin house, it was gorgeous and I may come back and take the two hour tour when the house is closer to being finished. The architecture was very planned out and Frank Loyd Wright put a lot of thought in exactly how he wanted his structure.

 With all the hidden things and the way he liked to make people feel uncomfortable in a space, to move or sit somewhere, it reminded me a bit of Rose Red. Rose Red was loosely based off a mansion called the Winchester House in which the wife continued to build the house to confuse the ghosts she believed were haunting her.
The Winchester Mansion contains 160 rooms and cost more the $5,500,000. There are miles of twisting hallways, with secret passage ways, staircases and doorways that lead to nowhere. A lot of it was designed by Sara Winchester herself. It was said that she asked helped with her design of the house with nightly seances and for protection from "bad" spirits. There was never any blue prints to the house and there also wasn't a building inspector.
"Mrs. Winchester’s elegant Grand Ballroom is built almost entirely without nails. It cost over $9,000 to complete at a time when an entire house could be built for less than $1,000! The silver chandelier is from Germany, and the walls and parquet floor are made of six hardwoods – mahogany, teak, maple, rosewood, oak, and white ash."
http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/thehouse.cfm

 Rose Red on the other hand, was a mansion that was remodeled to be a hotel, actually named Thornewood Castle, when author Stephen King wanted to use it for his movie, he modeled it to its original structure. In the book, Ellen Rimbaur and her life at Rose Red, she had married a rich man from an oil company and the house was his gift to her. The story goes that the house had been build in the early 20th century, on an old indian burial ground, which Ellen was not aware of upon purchasing the property. Mr. Rimbaur intended to cover up this fact and burned the bones of the Indians, aggravating the spirits. Many people got lost in the house, men would turn up dead and women missing. As had Mrs. Winchester, Mrs. Rimbaur continued to build her house for the spirits. She had hallways that led to nowhere and hallways that got smaller, with hidden doors for the rooms. I believe even though this house is fiction, it still poses a certain art.