“People always asked, ‘What is it like to live in a Wright house?’ or ‘What is it like to live in a Prairie [style] house?’ Because, in the vast compendium of books on Frank Lloyd Wright and his works, there are very few people who have written, or even talked, about what it is like to live in one!”
These are the words of Maya Moran Manny, a former Riverside resident who lived in Wright’s F. F. Tomek House, 150 Nuttall Rd., from 1974 to 2001.
Now, Manny is the author of “Love Letters to a Frank Lloyd Wright House,” a book assembled from her memories of and diaries from the quarter century she lived in the house with her first and then second husband and her four sons.
The book, which is available for purchase online at Lulu.com for $24.95, was written and edited over the span of a decade with the help of her son Michael Moran as Manny recalled life in the home and the never-ending restoration work her family did to maintain it.
“Twenty-seven years, and it was continuous, because one thing led to another,” she said of the restorations. “If you redid the stairs, you had to do the stucco, or if you had to do the stucco, you had to do the pillars and remove them. It was just a continuous thing. It did not end.”
The book is printed on-demand and priced at-cost plus shipping, as Manny “is just eager to share her experiences,” Moran said. A copy of the book, which features photos by Manny and her son Tom Moran alongside Manny’s paintings, is also available at the Riverside Public Library, they said.
Throughout the book, readers may notice the word “love” is printed in the same scarlet as the design on the front cover. The author said the project is a lesson on the different kinds of love — romantic love, familial love, and even the love one has for their home.
“I wanted to teach people to wait a bit [before] you get married, and I described how I had to get married if I wanted to stay in the [United] States because of the immigration laws, and I thought, later, ‘I don’t really know this man,’” said Manny, who was born in the Netherlands as a Belgian national due to her father’s heritage. “I was talking about love, also, and all its facets. … I felt I loved this house, and I loved it because I could make things for it, and I did things for it, like the sculpture I made of Frank [Lloyd Wright].”
Moran said he felt editing and laying out the book brought him closer to his mother.
“It’s been a fun project, working with my mom on this project, back and forth. We have a new layer to our relationship, kind of a professional layer,” he said. “It’s also been a pleasure to read my mom’s recollections of the whole [of] our time there. If you get the time to read the whole thing, there’s some really good writing; really eloquent passages that capture, though the beauty of the writing, the beauty of the experience of living in the house.”
Manny said the family who bought the house from her and her second husband still lives there, and the parents raised their sons there just as she did.
“When they saw the house, they fell in love with it, too,” she said.
She said she and her husband decided to move away as they approached old age and felt they couldn’t continue the restorative work needed for the home in addition to its being too large for them.
“Every time I walk down my hall, I see my morning glory painting, which is in the book, and then I remember very well how nice it was to sit on that little balcony,” Manny said. “The light coming in from the … ceiling in the little balcony is such a pleasure to see in the dining room. You see, there is light everywhere [in the home]. It lifts you up, and if you sit in the dark, you don’t feel so good.”
Update, April 30, 2025, 3:20 p.m.: An image of the book’s cover was swapped out for a posed photo provided by Moran after the story was first published.
