Twenty houses that made history

Ten minutes at a borrowed piano in a canyon house, and the biggest song on the record was finished before the coffee went cold.

A boy from a two-room shotgun house bought his mother a mansion at twenty-two, and then made the loudest room in it the one with green carpet on the ceiling.

Above the carriage house, six cats deep, a typewriter and the morning heat — and a walkway built so the work would start before the day could interrupt it.

The blue walls she was born inside and died inside, fifty-two years apart.

Fallingwater was a weekend house first. The Kaufmanns slept to the sound of it, complained about the damp, and kept coming back.

He wrote upstairs, between shots, with cigar smoke in the rafters — and called the seventeen years he lived there the happiest of his life.

Lights on meant he was awake. The neighbors learned to read them.

The biggest trumpet player in the world, a brick rowhouse, and kids on the stoop after school.

Case Study House #8 went up out of catalog steel in a matter of days, and then two people spent the rest of their lives filling it.

Nearly 1,800 poems written at a table the size of a tray, in a room with two windows and a locked door.

She bought the house for the patio door, then spent decades trying to get it right.

A New Deal farm colony house, cotton rows out back, a radio in the front room.

Eight people, 761 days, and a diary written at a desk by the window.

He walked to work in his socks. The tape machines ran until morning.

The VDL House was a laboratory the architect's own family had to live inside.

Months in bed with movie magazines and scrapbooks. The whole career starts here.

Mining town, upright piano, and a kid loud enough to get unplugged at the talent show.

Every pan outlined in marker so it went back where it belonged.

Three rooms, a clapboard house, and a town that paid for her lessons.