Apartment Choice

Frank Lloyd Wright , Olgivanna Wright (his wife), and their architectural apprentices began traveling to Arizona from Taliesin—Wright’s original Wisconsin home and studio—in the 1920s to consult on the Arizona Biltmore hotel and other projects. A near-fatal bout of pneumonia and the high cost of heating Taliesin during Depression- era winters convinced Wright in 1937 to search for a place to create a desert “camp” where the group could live cheaply and enjoy winter sunshine . Most of the buildings constructed at Taliesin West , as the Arizona location was called, were built by the apprentices under Wright's direction between 1938 and the mid-1950s. “Wright used Taliesin West as an architecture lab where he experimented with materials, forms and technology,” says Stuart Graff, CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation , the nonprofit that oversees both Taliesin locations . “His influence still holds today—how we live, how we build, how we affect the environment.” The apprenti...

This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org. I suspect that when Americans think about retiring abroad, they focus on Latin American countries , due to proximity and because places like Panama, Belize, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic usually show up on Best Places to Retire Abroad lists . Well, you won’t find any of those four countries in the Top 10 of The World’s Best Places to Retire in 2017 from Live and Invest Overseas . What you will find is a preponderance of Europe (six of the Top 10) plus a smattering of Mexico (two places) and Asia (two places, both in Malaysia). Another surprise: eight of those didn’t even make the Top 10 in the 2016 list from Live and Invest Overseas . “That surprised me too,” said Lief Simon, investment editor at Live and Invest Overseas and husband of the group’s founder and publisher, Kathleen Peddicord. In this year’s Top 10, the Algarve region of southern Portugal ranked No. 1 (for the fourth year in a row). Rounding out the...