Art to live by: ‘How do you want to live?’

How do you want to live? In a way, this question is where the story of the Zimmerman House begins. The year is 1949. Manchester transplants Isadore and Lucille Zimmerman are restless for roots.

At the city library, the married couple checks out a book about Frank Lloyd Wright. In his designs, they see something of their own lives reflected back to them. Here, at last, is what they pictured when they envisioned home.

Isadore asks Wright if he would design their home. Wright is in the middle of his work on the Guggenheim Museum, one of his landmark buildings, commissioned in 1943 and finished in 1959. Already, Wright has reached and then surpassed standard retirement age. He says yes. Then, he asks the Zimmermans how they want to live.

This is a beginning, however, in a story of beginnings – all of them centered on a shifting definition of home. Even before Wright drew up the first plan, there were many forces at work, personal and public, connecting the couples to this city and one another.

Here’s another beginning. Young Toufic Kalil arrives in Manchester, New Hampshire, from Lebanon as a little boy with his family. Scholarly and talented, Kalil grows up to become a prominent member of the Lebanese community and a respected doctor. In Boston for his residency, he meets Isadore Zimmerman, a leading urologist, whom he later recruits to work at St. Joseph’s.

And another. Two couples, friends and neighbors, don’t fit the mold of a standard American family at mid-century. Both wives work. They don’t have children. How they want to live is not like everyone else.

A new installation in the Currier’s Welcome Gallery tells this story of beginnings, and of home. It’s called Frank Lloyd Wright in Manchester: The Histories of the Zimmermans and the Kalils, and it opens June 11.

Artifacts culled from the Currier’s archive illuminate the spirit of collaboration between architect and client. Together, they created a place where daily life would be a work of art.

When you tour the homes with the Currier’s expert guides, you feel the beating heart of these trailblazing couples. It’s easy to picture Isadore and Lucille enjoying their morning coffee at the custom-built table for two overlooking the back garden or gathering around the quartet stand for an impromptu concert. In the Kalil House, the surprisingly ample living room paints an image of family celebrations, in a space filled with spectacular light.

What you experience is a beautiful vision of home. It’s not just anyone’s; it’s theirs.

This summer, when you step into the museum’s Welcome Gallery, you will discover what went into creating these iconic houses. You will read letters filled with personality and rigorous optimism. You will see wish lists and blueprints. You will see the emergence of a new kind of home for a new kind of family.

Here are faith and friendship, integrated into what it means to call a place home. Here is living alongside people like and unlike you and calling them neighbors.

The Zimmerman and Kalil Houses are as much a Manchester story as a Frank Lloyd Wright story.

The Kalils brought the Zimmermans to Manchester. The Zimmermans brought Frank Lloyd Wright to Manchester. The Kalils made Manchester home to not just one Wright-designed home, but two.

It is no small thing to build a home that reflects your authentic life. And it is no small thing, either, to be the city that houses them.

Frank Lloyd Wright in Manchester: The Histories of the Zimmermans and the Kalils opens June 11 at the Currier Museum of Art. Book your tour of the houses and then visit the new installation.

Ali Goldstein is a writer who first fell in love with art museums on a French class field trip to see a Degas exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Today, she is the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Currier Museum of Art, where she helps others take their first step into the arts. She can be reached at agoldstein@currier.org.