BY KAREN BOSSICK

The first summer Henry Whiting spent in Sun Valley he drove to Bliss and peered over the fence at Teater’s Knoll—the only building Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed in Idaho.

What he saw of the home sitting on the bluffs above the Snake River fascinated him.

“I went back every six months to peer over the fence. And, when it came on the market five years later, I drove down to see inside. I had no interest in buying it. I just wondered what was behind the curtains,” Whiting recounted.

It was 20 below zero that day, Whiting recalled. The power in the house was off. And blackout curtains kept the light out.

But someone struck a book of matches to reveal a dining room table covered with sheets. It resembled a ghost in the flickering light.

All of a sudden, it occurred to Whiting that purchasing and restoring the home would be a wonderful way to learn about Frank Lloyd Wright.

“The house was not exactly in ruins, but it was in need of love,” he said.

Whiting shared a little about the love that he devoted to the home built in 1952 to an elbow-to-elbow crowd at the opening of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts’ newest exhibition “Art into Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright, Archie Teater and Teater’s Knoll” on Friday.

And he plans to divulge even more when he joins The Center’s Kristin Poole and Courtney Gilbert on a free exhibition tour looking at the Wright home and its original owner—painter Archie Teater—tonight. The tour starts at 5:30 p.m. tonight—Thursday, Dec. 7—at The Center at Fifth and Washington streets in Ketchum. Wine will be served.

“Based on how many people came to the opening, it feels like the right project for the community,” said Gilbert. “We have a lot of people who are interested in architecture and history. And listening to Henry talk about renovating and living in the house is fascinating.”

Frank Lloyd Wright designed the home during his last decade at the same time he was designing the Guggenheim Museum. He designed it for landscape artist Archie Teater, Idaho’s most prolific artist.

It was the only art studio Wright ever designed.

The walls do not feature 90-degree angles like the average American home but, rather 60 and 120 degree angles.

“It provides a great incredible uplifting feeling. It seems as if it’s reaching for the divine,” said Whiting.

The house is meant as a place for creativity. It’s not meant as a family house but as a studio for an artist with a partition for the bedroom, Whiting noted.

“It’s not always the easiest place to live but it is fascinating to be within. It’s like being inside a musical instrument,” he added, noting that Wright loved Bach and other musicians.

Whiting’s labor of love included replacing 105 pieces of glass with thermal pane. Not only was it a task finding the perfect panes but each gasket around each pane had to be reinforced with wood trim.

Whiting also hired craftsmen to create furniture based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy of organic architecture, which involved designing furniture and decorating objects in keeping with site and structure, exterior and interior.

Ketchum carpenter Paul Bates, for instance, built a lamp and coffee table that’s currently on display in the exhibition. Other pieces of furniture include an original high-back chair designed by Wright to enclose guests and bring them together in an intimate protected space around the dining table.

“With tremendous thoughtfulness he restored the house back to life, restored it back to its intended life—a place of creativity,” said Kristin Poole.

Whiting, a landscape architect, was raised in a house designed by Alden B. Dow, a charter member of Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship and Whiting’s great uncle and mentor.

He moved to Sun Valley in 1997 to help architect Neil Wright with the design and drawings for his parent’s new home, which faces Dollar Mountain. Whiting quickly learned the summers in Sun Valley are as great as the winters.

“I had skied here for 10 years. But, as a Michigan native, I had never before experienced alpine lakes,” he said.

Whiting went on to commission a contemporary protégé of Wright’s—architect Bart Prince—to design a home at the mouth of Greenhorn inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s aesthetics.

Today he is the author of two books on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Teater’s Knoll.

The Hagerman Valley Historical Society Museum and Whiting held an open house last August. And they hope to stage another open house next spring--probably in May.

“No words, pictures or photos do it justice,” said Whiting. “It’s one of the best natural sites Frank Lloyd Wright worked with chosen by a man who was a painter.”

In addition to pictures, architectural blueprints and photographs of the house, The Center is showcasing a dozen Archie Teater paintings. Many are of Idaho, with horses in front of Ketchum’s old Stockman’s Club, the drive-through for motor vehicles at the old Challenger Inn and Malad Gorge where Teater once lived in a cave.

Several, including one depicting the Battle of Little Big Horn and Teater’s Knoll are quite detailed. Another depicts the Thunder Mountain Mine, 75 miles east of McCall, named for a cavernous river that sounded like thunder.

The mountains in the picture don’t quite mirror the mountains around McCall.

“Archie Teater was always embellishing things. He often put the Matterhorn in a painting,” said Kristin Poole.

“One of the things I love about my job is that every once in awhile I get the chance to share a treasure from our community,” said Gilbert. “It was Henry Whiting’s dedication to Teater’s Knoll over the last 35 years that made this possible. And it was the Hagerman Valley Historical Society Museum that opened its vaults for us to go through Archie Teater’s many paintings.”