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Rest Haven Motel

Commons category link is locally definedHotel buildings completed in 1952Hotel buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in WisconsinModernist architecture in WisconsinMotels in the United States
National Register of Historic Places in Sauk County, WisconsinUse mdy dates from August 2023Wisconsin Registered Historic Place stubs
Usonian Inn
Usonian Inn

The Rest Haven Motel, also known as the Usonian Inn, is a historic motel at E5116 U.S. Highway 14 in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Mr. and Mrs. John Michels opened the motel in 1952 to serve travelers on the new route of U.S. 14, which was realigned to bypass downtown Spring Green in 1944. Architect Jesse C. Caraway, a member of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship, designed the motel according to Wright's Usonian principles. The hotel has a two-story central core, which contains its office and owner's residence, and two one-story wings of rooms with low cantilevered canopy roofs, reflecting the typical pattern of Usonian homes. Each room has small, high windows on the side of the building facing the road and larger windows in the rear; this arrangement, which was common to both Wright's work and motel designs of the era, provided lodgers with privacy while giving them a protected view of the motel's natural surroundings. While the hotel has passed through multiple owners, it is still in operation and is a rare intact example of an owner-occupied mid-century motel.The motel was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 20, 2011.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Rest Haven Motel (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Rest Haven Motel
US Highway 14, Town of Spring Green

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 43.185555555556 ° E -90.063055555556 °
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Address

US Highway 14

US Highway 14
53588 Town of Spring Green
Wisconsin, United States
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Usonian Inn
Usonian Inn
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Riverview Terrace Restaurant
Riverview Terrace Restaurant

The Riverview Terrace Restaurant, also known as The Spring Green Restaurant, is a building designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1953 near his Taliesin estate in Wisconsin. He purchased the land on which to build the restaurant as, "a wayside for tourists with a balcony over the river." Construction began the next year, with the roof being added by 1957. The building was incomplete when he died in 1959, but was purchased in 1966 by the Wisconsin River Development Corporation and completed the next year as The Spring Green restaurant. In 1968, Food Service Magazine had an article about the newly opened restaurant: ... [W]hen a restaurant is designed by such a giant in his profession as the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright, it's important to find out what makes it a thing of beauty—to analyze in detail the elements of its design and appointments in search of principles that can be applied to food service facilities elsewhere. No one in the past century has influenced architecture as an art and science more profoundly than Frank Lloyd Wright. Basic to his philosophy of "organic" architecture was the tenet that a building and its environment should be as one—that the structure, through proper blending of native materials and creation of appropriate linear features, should be in perfect harmony with its surroundings. "Organic architecture comes out of nature," Wright said in a Food Service Magazine interview shortly before he died. He believed that each detail of the architecture and interior should be related to the building's overall concept. Each design element should reflect the whole environment, as opposed to having each design component reflect a separate idea all its own. ... The Spring Green is a very subtle structure. It does not impose brash neon signs or harsh vertical lines upon an essentially horizontal rolling countryside. The structure is built, for the most part, only of those materials that come from the vital riverscape which is the site of the restaurant. Wright's disciple, William Wesley Peters ... observes, "The building and its forms arise from the use of natural materials to their specific properties. For example, the rich, buff-colored limestone was quarried only a few miles away. It was laid in great horizontal courses with long, thin, projecting ledges that symbolically represent the character and quality of the stone at the quarry."Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (first director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives and director emeritus until his death in 2017) wrote that, "In 1993 the building converted to use as the Visitor Center for the Taliesin Buildings." As stated by Pfeiffer, the building has functioned as the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center since 1994. It is owned and operated under the direction of Taliesin Preservation, the non-profit organization in Wisconsin that restores and preserves the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings on the Taliesin estate. As a visitor center, the building is the starting point for tours of the Taliesin estate and houses a giftshop, restaurant (known as "The Riverview Terrace Cafe") and offices for Taliesin Preservation. The building is open during tourist season.