Custom Furnishings From Frank Lloyd Wright’s Only Skyscraper Have Been Preserved for Posterity

The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy hopes to return the 11 artifacts to the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma

Sonja Anderson – Daily Correspondent

These custom copper stools from Price Tower were sold in 2024 and later purchased by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. 20c Design

Earlier this year, an Oklahoma skyscraper designed by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright sold for $1.4 million. But for months before the Price Tower hit the auction block, its cash-strapped owners had been selling off the building’s custom furnishings.Now, 11 of those artifacts have been repurchased by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Wright’s legacy. According to a statement from the conservancy, these pieces had been protected under a preservation easement but had been sold anyway, without the organization’s permission.

Quick fact: What is Frank Lloyd Wright known for?

The architect was famously a pioneer of the Prairie style, which is characterized by horizontal lines, open floor plans and integration with the natural landscape.

“We negotiated a purchase price that prioritized preservation over litigation,” says Barbara Gordon, executive director of the conservancy, in the statement. “Our top priority was to keep these artifacts together and off the private market. Our aim now is to return them to the building that they were designed for: Price Tower.”

Located in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Price Tower was originally intended for Manhattan. Wright designed it in the 1920s as a New York City apartment complex, but the Great Depression tanked construction. In the early 1950s, businessman Harold C. Price tasked Wright with designing the corporate headquarters for his oil pipeline company. The architect proposed using his existing blueprints from the 1920s.

Price Tower was finished in 1956, and Wright described it as “the tree that escaped the crowded forest.” Central elevator shafts make up its “trunk,” while green copper panels resemble leaves. The 19-story tower is the only skyscraper Wright ever built. In 2007, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.

In 2023, Cynthia and Anthem Blanchard purchased Price Tower, and the building “spiraled into a storm of scandals, legal disputes and financial chaos,” reported the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise’s Andy Dossett in 2024. It was ultimately sold to the property developer McFarlin Building, a Tulsa-based company that plans to restore the skyscraper.

Like most of Wright’s creations, Price Tower was filled with custom furnishings. The architect wanted his buildings “to be an integrated whole aesthetically, and believed the only way to do that was to design all elements of the space,” Margo Stipe, a former director at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, told Art & Object’s Colleen Smith in 2017. “Throughout his career, he designed custom sofas, chairs, library tables, side tables, sideboards, dining sets, desks, display cabinets, lighting [and] hassocks.”

The conservancy’s newly acquired items include Price Tower’s directory board, two stools, an armchair, three copper tables and four embossed copper panels. In 2024, they were sold to 20c Design, a Dallas-based furniture dealer. Per the statement, the items are now in “secure, museum-quality art storage in the Dallas area.”

“The purchase allowed us to secure our easement-protected items without the uncertainty and high cost of pursuing further legal action,” Gordon says in the statement. “We’re deeply grateful to the generous donors who made it possible for us to save these unique Wright-designed items.”