File:William R. Heath House, Soldiers Place and Bird Avenue, Elmwood Village, Buffalo, NY - 52665258762.jpg

English: Built in 1903-1905, this Prairie-style house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for William R. Heath, a lawyer whom served as the office manager and vice president for the Larkin Company, and his wife, Mary Hubbard Heath. The house is located on a corner lot at the intersection of Soldiers Circle and Bird Avenue, and was a precedent for the later, more famous, and similarly-sited Robie House in Chicago, and maintains much of its original character, minus a mid-20th Century alteration of the rear wing of the house, adding windows, enclosing the rear porches, extension of the west wing, and partial demolition of the north wing of the original carriage house. The eastern end of the house and the two-story southern portion of the carriage house remain largely unaltered. The house is a contributing structure in the Elmwood Historic District–East, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

The house features a red brick exterior with raked horizontal mortar joints and filled-in vertical joints, with some sections of the facade that have been repointed being done in a way that does not follow this technique, and further diminishes the already altered historic character of the house. The house features an asymmetrical cross-shaped layout, stone belt coursing, hipped roofs with wide overhanging eaves, art glass windows with wooden trim, including a ribbon that wraps the corners at the east facade, a first-floor porch on the east facade facing Soldiers Place with brick corner pillars, corner pillars below the second floor windows, with obscured drainage basins for the downspouts, an obscured front entrance at a 90 degree angle from Bird Avenue, a concrete base, casement and fixed privacy glass windows on the north facade of the one-story west wing, and a rear carriage house with two garage bays, with a rooftop terrace on the low-slope roof of the one-story north wing of the carriage house, enclosed by a parapet. The house is surrounded by a small yard with naturalistic landscaping, with the landscaped public park circle in the front providing an additional outdoor green space in front of the house. Inside, the house features original woodwork, with a master bedroom at the east end of the second floor overlooking the park, a living room immediately west of the front porch, a dining room in the middle of the south side of the east wing, and a kitchen at the west end of the east wing.

The house remains privately owned, and is located in a prestigious location of a prestigious neighborhood, being a significant early work by Wright, influencing many of his more well-known later Prairie-style houses, and being prominently sited. The house sits among other houses of very different and diverse architectural styles, contributing to the neighborhood’s fabric of diverse and significant historic buildings.