Louis Sullivan Summer Cottage
Date: 1890
City: Ocean Springs, Mississippi
Accessibility: Destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005
Category: Residence
Following the completion of the monumental Auditorium Building, Louis Sullivan purchased property in Ocean Springs, Mississippi on which to build a personal vacation cottage. Sullivan was especially enchanted by the verdant landscape he encountered there and wrote that flowering trees like azaleas, dogwood, and magnolia were “grouped and arranged as though by the hand of an unseen poet.” Wright likely drafted the design for Sullivan’s cottage. The t-shaped building—which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina—featured a veranda that looked out onto a rose garden and the Davis Bayou on the Gulf of Mexico. The horizontality of the low-slung hip roof grounded the cottage in its sylvan setting. The building serves as an early expression of Wright’s interest in unifying his architecture with the natural environment in which it was built.