Luis Marden - The Marden House

The Marden House

Marden and his wife, Ethel Cox Marden, lived in "Fontinalis" (also known as Marden House), a house overlooking the Potomac built by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1952 and 1959. The spot had caught Marden's eye in 1944 when he and his wife and had been fishing for hickory shad (Alosa mediocris) along the Potomac, near Chain Bridge. After purchasing a plot of land, Marden continued the correspondence he had maintained with Wright since 1940, asking the architect to design a home for them. In 1938, Marden had seen a "dream house" in Life that Wright had designed for the typical American family.

It was not until 1952 that the designs from Wright finally came. The house is a flat-roofed, cinder-block home trimmed in mahogany that curves into the side of a hill; it comes to an abrupt point upriver, like the bow of a boat. "Our beautiful house...stands proudly just under the brow of the hill, looking down always on the rushing water which constantly sings to it, day and night, winter and summer," Ethel wrote to Wright in 1959."

After Marden moved to a nursing home in 1998, the house was purchased and refurbished by Jim Kimsey, co-founder of AOL, in 2000 for $2.5 million.