the University in 1930. Mary 
Palmer, a pianist, graduated 
from the music theory program 
in 1937, and the couple married 
that same year.

It was Mary Palmer who 

reached out to Frank Lloyd 
Wright to design the home, 
and it was she who put in the 
work to see the initiative to 
completion — a trend true for 
many women with spectacled 
husbands who spend too much 
time in the study. The Palmers 
were living in a farm home 
on Geddes Avenue when they 
purchased two lots on Orchard 
Hills Drive with a generous 
donation from Mary Palmer’s 
father, who was involved in 
various banking and business 
interests. By then, they’d had 
their two children, Adrian in 
1940 and Mary Louise in 1942. 
But it wasn’t just for them that 
they wanted the new home: The 
Palmers loved to entertain, and 
found it exceedingly difficult 
to do so at the more cramped 
estate. So the Palmers shopped 
around for an architect, looking 
at local homes for inspiration. 
They were especially attracted 
to the Margaret and Harry 
Towsley home on Vinewood 
Avenue, which was owned by 
and built for the Towsleys in 
1932. Dr. Harry Towsley was a 
professor and a pediatrician at 
the University’s Medical School, 
while Margaret Towsley was 
an active community member, 
volunteering 
for 
Planned 

Parenthood, 
the 
community 

center and the Republican Party.

The Towsley home is arguably 

the beginning of the modernist 
architecture movement in Ann 
Arbor, with its flat roof and its 
garage that faced the street — 
a bold move then, and a first 
for the city. It was designed by 
Alden Dow, a Michigan architect 
who apprenticed under Wright. 
He would go on to design many 
prominent buildings in Ann 
Arbor, including the City Hall 
(on Huron Street, just down the 
street from those monstrous, 
ever-under-construction, 
brand-new student apartment 
buildings), 
the 
Ann 
Arbor 

District Library, the Matthaei 
Botanical Gardens and several 
on-campus facilities.

It was Bill Palmer’s brother, 

Carlos, who first suggested to 
the Palmers at a cocktail party 
that they seek out Dow’s mentor 

himself, Frank Lloyd Wright. 
Carlos 
Palmer 
was 
familiar 

with Wright’s work, and stated 
matter-of-factly their architect 
should be, “Wright, of course.”

Though Mary and Bill Palmer 

are no longer alive, conversations 
with the family regarding the 
house were recorded by Grant 
Hildebrand 
and 
synthesized 

into a book, published nearly 
a decade ago. Cox presents a 
volume to me, titled simply 
“Frank Lloyd Wright’s Palmer 
House,” 
with 
a 
sense 
of 

inherited pride. It rests on the 
living room coffee table, which 
is shaped as a parallelogram. 
These conversations illuminate 
a 
meticulousness 
by 
the 

Palmers in planning their home, 
especially from Mary Palmer’s 
end; she speaks in big ideas, 
and with poetic eloquence. She 
explained her first time walking 
through a Wright home with her 
husband as so:

“We sensed a new experience 

immediately on entering the 
carport and on into the loggia. 
… But inside there was warmth 
everywhere — in the fireplace, in 
the beautiful cypress throughout 
the house, and in the marvelous, 
warm floors.”

And 
yet 
she 
was 
not 

immediately sold on Wright. 
She explained, “I was attracted 
to his philosophy but … did 
I really want to live in one 
of those houses?” Here, she 
gets at something that feels 
tangible walking through this 
museum-home. 
The 
almost 

overbearing intention of the 
place 
doesn’t 
necessarily 

scream “homey.” “There was no 
basement rec room, no place that 
wasn’t 
absolutely 
beautiful,” 

remembers 
the 
daughter 

Mary Louise, describing the 
tenseness that comes with such 
beauty. Indeed, there’s a strict 
atmosphere in the air as we walk 
around; Cox has disallowed 
photographs of nearly all the 
interior, since it was stayed in just 
last night. When we walk into 
the bedrooms, with the bedding 
slightly unmade, he seems a bit 
embarrassed. 
He 
apologizes. 

The house is “not quite perfect 
right now.” Yet there’s a comfort 
in seeing the parallelogram beds 
imperfect, some humanity in 
those wrinkled sheets.

But on the drive home from 

a visit to a Wright house, Mary 
Palmer explained that she and 
Bill Palmer looked one another 
in the eyes and said, “Let’s get 
Mr. Wright,” and so they — or 
rather, she — did. Wright was 
83 and it was May when Mary 
Palmer tracked him down at 
North Carolina State University. 
Wright was giving a lecture 
to their architectural school, 
and Palmer approached him 
and gave him extensive notes 
about the plot on Orchard Hills. 
Wright accepted the job, and 
replied to Palmer: “Now you go 
back to your husband and take 
care of those children. They 
need to live in one of my houses. 
I’ll take these things with me.”

Wright 
presented 
the 

Palmers with the original “plan 
geometry” in January 1951, and 
Mary, one of the few Wright 
homeowners 
to 
push 
back 

successfully on parts of his plan, 
made a few changes. Red brick 
was exchanged for the concrete 
originally proposed; a shower 
was added, an amenity which 
Wright was often reluctant to 
include in his homes, being a 
man of baths himself. After 
revisions, construction began 
that April, and the house was 
completed the following year, 
just in time for the Christmas of 
1952.

Mary Palmer, like her home, 

was a woman strict in her 
structure. Cox pauses while 
describing her, and lands on 
“feisty” — “quite a gal.” She often 
told her children to maintain 
“visual order,” in their home, and 
in all things, and her son Adrian 
later complained that he missed 
a place where he could “have just 
messed around.” There seems to 
be a price paid for the home’s 
impeccable beauty. Still, he says 
he later recognized the higher 
pleasure of the home — and, 
unspoken but understood, of his 
own mother’s order.

Mary Palmer was integral to 

the local community, heading 
the Ann Arbor music society 
and often hosting elaborate 
recitals in her home, where she 
kept a Steinway Grand for such 
occasions. She had an interest 
in the spiritual and bodily, and 
became dedicated to yoga later 
in her life. A remembrance for 
her, published by the National 
Iyengar Yoga Association after 
her death in 2011, describes 
her passion for the practice. 
According to the piece, Palmer’s 
fascination with yoga began 
in the ’60s; the passion, as the 
story goes, blossomed from her 
studies under B.K.S. Iyengar of 
India. Palmer tracked him down 
in 1969, and sat in on his classes 
for nearly three weeks before 
he would speak with her. He 
had seen her as another of the 
floating tourist types from the 
United States who were common 
in this period of Revolver and 
Sgt. Pepper’s, coming only for 
photos and a story to bring back 
West. But Palmer was not, and 
proved her allegiance with a 
15-minute headstand.

A line from her book on the 

subject 
elaborates 
on 
such 

dedication:

“The lure of yoga demands 

from one the highest potential. 
At the same time it reveals one’s 
weaknesses. The moment of 
truth cannot be experienced 
without the constant play of 
these opposing forces.”

Palmer 
passed 
away 
in 

2011. She had been living in a 
“memory facility” in Ypsilanti, 
as Cox describes it, for the last 
few years of her life.

2B —Thursday, December 7, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

CEREN DAG/DAILY

House on Orchard Hills: Frank 
Llyod Wright’s modernist haven

B-SIDE LEAD

Consider 
triangles, 
and 

consider 
geometry. 
These 

structures are here, literally 
and 
in 
spirit: 
The 
small 

interior benches are triangles; 
the shower is a triangle; the 
lampshades are triangles; the 
roof, too, is a triangle, though 
it’s an especially idiosyncratic 
example. Consisting of cedar 
shingles and wooden fascias, 
it folds downward just slightly 
and moves into an aggressive 
point in the backyard, where it 
hangs over a patio that expands 
into the grass. The roof looks 
almost like a spaceship, moving 
through the stars — except this 
spaceship stands among blowing 
leaves, and atop a hill. That is, 
it’s almost winter now, and the 
trees are beginning to prepare 
for it, shedding their green and 
yellow onto the ground, making 
a red circle around the wooden 
bench in the backyard. The 
circle of red leaves is fallen from 
the apple tree that stands behind 
the bench. The roof looks right 
at it. 

Geometry can be confusing. 

There’s an adage that parents 
tell their children who are 
bad at geometry: If you’re bad 
at geometry, you’ll be good at 
algebra. If you’re bad at algebra, 
you’ll be good at geometry. For 
those kids in the first camp, 
who took to numbers rather 
than shapes, geometry might 
have felt forced, oddly unreal — 
inapplicable — with its sines and 
cosines, linear planes and precise 
measurements of the angles of a 
hexagon. The consequences of 
3.14 and antipodal points might 
feel too abstract and separated 
from the ball you smack in a 
tennis match. It can be hard to 

see how math relates at all to 
this strange-ceilinged home on 
a hill.

But there is an approachable 

geometry 
at 
Frank 
Lloyd 

Wright’s Palmer House, situated 
at the top of Orchard Hills Drive, 
right on the edge of Ann Arbor’s 
city limits. When you drive up the 
lightly graveled driveway after 
curving back and forth a few 
times, you first notice the sharp 
edges of the outdoor garage. 
There’s a flat awning supported 
by triangular brick columns for 
vehicles, and for most cars, the 
back bumper will stick out just 
a little farther than the awning 
supports. Then you notice more 
shapes. There are the long and 
thin rectangular prisms of the 
stairs that lead to the front door, 
and a corner of the home stands 
to the left of the stairs (when you 
enter, you’ll then notice this is 
the kitchen), with two separate, 
horizontal rows of identical 
designs running through it. 
These are little windows cut 
into concrete blocks, and there 
are 40 of them that surround 
the kitchen, though only about 
half face out to the stairs by the 
entryway. This is a structure 
with a meticulousness for edges 
and lines. It feels hyperaware of 
where the eye will go, and where 
it wants to lead it. This home’s 
geometry leads first to the door.

The two front doors are in 

the French style and could 
pass as windows, if it weren’t 
for the dainty handles at waist 
level. Gary Cox, a resident of 
Plymouth, opens one. Cox is 
wearing a horizontally striped 
polo and blue jeans, and his 
rimless reading spectacles sit on 
a counter, facing the entryway.

Cox is the father of the 

current owner of the Palmer 
House, Jeffrey Schox. Schox, 
who does not live in Ann Arbor, 

is a graduate of the University 
of 
Michigan’s 
mechanical 

engineering program, and he 
now runs a patent law firm 
focused on startups; it has a 
sleek website that uses words 
like “transparency,” “passion” 
and “excellence.” He also has 
a soul patch, and resides in San 
Francisco.

Cox is responsible for most 

of the daily upkeep of the home, 

which now operates as a guest 
house 
year-round. 
(This 
is 

discounting assorted holidays. 
The family likes to spend their 
Christmases here.) He gives the 
rare tour and checks on the state 
of the infrastructure. Cox walks 
into the living room, where he 
begins to revel in his knowledge 
of the home. The room feels 
massive, though by square feet 
it’s a little larger than most 
American lounges.

Cox meets each client before 

turning over the keys, and this 

is at least in part for vetting 
purposes. 
He 
reserves 
the 

right, he says, to turn a renter 
away at the door if he feels it’s 
necessary. But he has never done 
so, and these door greetings 
act more as an introduction to 
the home, which Cox says is 
the most difficult part of his 
job. To articulate to the clients 
what this all means; “to get the 
clients to … understand,” he 
says, requires this introduction. 
Cox speaks eloquently, at times 
impassionedly, when he talks 
about the Palmer House. He 
sometimes chuckles slightly as 
he recounts the details of the 
lives of the original owners. 
He has given this talk and tour 
many times — gave it just last 
week, to a group of students 
from the University’s Taubman 
College of Architecture and 
Urban Planning.

Keeping the name, “Palmer 

House,” is one of the stipulations 
for owning the home, which was 
designed by famed American 
architect Frank Lloyd Wright 
in the early 1950s. The home is 
under easement by the National 
Register of Historic Places, and 
beyond keeping the title, the 
new owners must also consult 
— and get approval from — the 
conservatory register to make 
any design changes, no matter 
how mundane. Every so often, 
the conservatory register makes 
a visit to inspect conditions. He 
speaks on these visits as if they 
were coffee dates among friends, 
chatting about the latest shift in 
furniture.

The title comes from the 

home’s original owners, William 
Palmer and his wife, Mary. Both 
were graduates of the University. 
William Palmer, known more 
commonly as Bill, or Billy, 
became a professor of economics 
after earning his master’s from 

MATT GALLATIN

Daily Music Editor

The roof looks 

almost like 

a spaceship, 

moving through 

the stars; except 

this spaceship 

stands among 

blowing leaves, 

and atop a hill. 

CEREN DAG/DAILY

But inside there 

was warmth 

everywhere — 

in the fireplace, 

in the beautiful 

cypress 

throughout the 

house, and in 

the marvelous, 

warm floors.

