Offecct Gives Frank Lloyd Wright Tiles a New Lease on Life
Nearly 100 years ago, Frank Lloyd Wright began experimenting with a humble building material: concrete. Capitalizing on its potential for reproduction, he developed a new design for houses crafted from concrete blocks and developed standard cast patterns for each house. Of the four homes built in the so-called Textile Block method, only one remains: Ennis House, in Los Feliz, once the private home of Charles and Mabel Ennis and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Nestled into a hillside, the home is most recognizable for its textural, patterned surface. Now, this iconic design is about to become vastly more accessible, thanks to the latest launch from Swedish office brand Offecct.
As part of its new product line unveiled today at the Stockholm Furniture Fair and dubbed, appropriately, Legendary Furniture, Revived, the company has partnered with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to reimagine the cement tiles on his Ennis House as sound-absorbing, indoor wall panels.
"It's all about preserving a legacy," Offecct founder Kurt Tingdal tells AD PRO. "Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the most successful architects in the world. The concrete design, though, is only accessible to one owner. So we contacted the foundation and said, 'We think there's an opportunity to use some of these patterns with modern materials."
The foundation was taken with the idea, and gave Offecct permission to replicate the Ennis House tile in a polyester fiber. As Tingdal sees it, the result is not only a way of bringing Wright's design to a new audience, but an ultimate form of sustainability.
"When you take something from the past and give it a new life, that's really a type of sustainability," he explains. "We're bringing this design into a new era." Here's hoping we see many more Frank Lloyd Wright–swathed offices soon.
