Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fountainhead will be opened to the public for the first time

Last summer, we reported that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fountainhead had come on the market for $2.5 million; following its listing with Crescent Sotheby’s International Realty, the property has now been acquired by the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA).

The purchase of the Wright-designed residence in Jackson’s mid-century Fondren neighbourhood marks a significant step in the museum’s goal of engaging local communities, and will open Fountainhead to the public for the first time.

The house, also known as the J. Willis Hughes House, was designed in 1948 and completed in 1954 for oil speculator J. Willis Hughes, who lived there with his family until 1980. It was later purchased by the architect Robert Parker Adams, who devoted years to its restoration before his death in July.

Fountainhead has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980 for its architectural significance. It is a quintessential example of Wright’s Usonian philosophy – his vision for a distinctly American style of architecture. Usonian homes were typically single-level bungalows designed for middle-income families, emphasising affordability, functionality, aesthetic simplicity and harmony with nature.

Fountainhead was constructed without traditional materials such as stud walls, sheetrock or brick, instead featuring Heart Tidewater Red Cypress walls and ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. Its parallelogram layout responds to the site’s unique topography, influencing everything from wall placement to door proportions.

The residence is known as Fountainhead partly due to the belief that Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, was inspired by Wright’s life. The name also refers to a key architectural feature: Wright used the site’s sloping terrain to extend the bedroom wing into the landscape, incorporating a fountain that feeds into a swimming pool, which then flows into a stream.

Following the acquisition, MMA will begin restoring the home and developing a plan for its maintenance, with the public opening date to be announced later. The museum will manage the property and its programming to ensure its long-term relevance, including providing bus shuttles to the site. MMA director Betsy Bradley describes that, in making Fountainhead an extension of the museum’s offerings, it will ‘[allow] access to this national treasure, inviting visitors to engage deeply with Mississippi’s architectural heritage and design legacy’.

The board of trustees chair, Lisa Percy, predicts that ‘Fountainhead will become a must-see destination and unique experience for residents of and visitors to Jackson’, adding that MMA was inspired by successful initiatives at other institutions, such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s purchase of Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House in Arkansas.