The Coonley Estate was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 20th Century.  It was a unique estate that had a multitude of buildings.  Sometime in the mid-20th century, the estate was parted out and there are now four individual residences that used to be part of the overall estate: there’s the living room wing, the bedroom with, the gardener’s cottage and the coachhouse.  The most well known of these is the living room wing.  It has an enormous and incredibly photogenic lily pond on the property that is beyond beautiful.  So I did everything in my power not to shoot there.

The lily pond has been shot many times with care and I didn’t feel like there was anything I could add to it that hadn’t been done already.  I felt the exact same way about the exterior of the Freeark house.  I did, however, want to include something from the Coonley estate in my series, Riverside at One Hundred Fifty though.  And thus the bedroom wing entered the picture (literally).

The feature of the bedroom wing that I liked the best was it had a huge outdoor corridor in the very middle of the house.  There were a number of rooms and a kitchen to the west, a long hallway over the outdoor corridor and then the master bedroom to the east (above the garage).  Whenever I walked by the house, it felt like the layout meant something interesting was always going on in that corridor.  That was the idea that I decided to go with for this image.  A group of people are in the corridor and Stephanus Greeff, the house’s owner, is upstairs.

When I have two or more groups of people in photos, I always try to have a differing set of energies to them.  Here, I love how out of place Greeff looks inside his own house.  I purposely had Greeff dress in light colored, earth tones and the people outside in primary colors to highlight this disparity.  All and all, I think it works beautifully.