San Rafael resident Maya Moran Manny has experienced love in many forms: romantic love, the love for her four sons and an enduring love affair with a special house.

The house that stole Manny’s heart — and gave her sustenance and healing during some tough times — for 27 years is widely known as the Tomek House, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s earliest commissions.

It’s the subject of her newly self-published book, “Love Letters to a Frank Lloyd Wright House” ($24.95).

Its 64 pages are accompanied by contemporaneous photographs taken by Manny and her son, Tom Moran, of the home and garden.

“This house became bewitching and cast its spell on me,” she writes in the book. “It soothed me and welcomed me.”

And, in a letter to her mother when the house was first purchased, Manny writes, “It’s as if I’m breathing fresh air, and my soul can stretch itself again.”

Manny says she wrote the book, which is based both on her general observations on love and her personal experience as a 27-year occupant of a house she loved, as an answer to the question she gets asked most often — what’s it really like to live in a Wright house?

The love affair started in 1974, when she and her first husband purchased the Prairie-style home in Riverside, Illinois. The property was in disrepair.

The Prairie style, a Wright introduction, was a “bold new approach to domestic architecture,” according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, and “inspired by the broad, flat landscape of the American Midwest.”

This style featured a long, horizontal profile with a sense of openness to the interiors and a deliberate relationship between the indoors and outdoors.

The more than 4,000-square-foot, three-story Tomek House was built in 1904. It was a precursor to Wright’s nearby but more famous Prairie-style Robie House.

Besides the expected bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen and dining and living rooms, the Tomek House also had a reception room, or den, billiards room, wine cellar and a big bonus room and maids’ quarters downstairs.

What could be considered unexpected for that time was the walk-out balcony with a translucent floor in the primary bedroom upstairs. This translucent floor worked as a translucent ceiling skylight, which infused the dining room alcove directly beneath it with sunlight.

The home’s other innovative features were the steel beam cantilevers, supported by brick pillars inside which allowed for the continuous rows of windows, including a set of casement windows that captured Manny’s imagination.

“It was the light everywhere that lifted my spirits,” she said.

And, in that light-filled space, Manny found inspiration.

Soon, the house and its garden inspired Manny’s paintings, many of which appear in the pages of the book, and in the custom rugs, pillows and draperies she created for the house, recreating its shapes and colors in them. She even made some dresses for herself, including one that paid homage to the casement windows she loved.

Outside, she turned her attention to the garden, removing the evergreens that overwhelmed the house. She returned the garden to its Prairie-style origins with an herbaceous border.

Through her scholarly research of Wright and his architectural intentions for the Tomek House, Manny lovingly restored the property extensively and to such meticulous standards that it became a national historic landmark in 1999, one of the few listed properties that’s still used as a residence. (Manny shepherded the property garden through an easement process to protect it in perpetuity.)

As a result, she was asked by art and architectural groups to lecture on the Tomek House and elements of Wright’s Prairie style, and to consult and create Prairie-style gardens for other homeowners.

She also won awards for her beloved former home, including two Frederick Law Olmsted Society awards for restoration and one from the Landmarks Preservation Council in Illinois.

She sold the Tomek House in 2001 when she and her second husband, wanting to simplify their lives, moved to California, where two of her sons lived.

Through her story, Manny proves true the Wright quote she uses to close her book:

“Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the atmosphere of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is in the soil in which it is planted.”

The Halprin home

Another new book that explores the relationship between a home and its inhabitants is “The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design” (Oxford University Press, $23.99 to $99).

The author, Janice Ross, professor emerita of Stanford’s theater and performance studies department, will read from it, and sign copies, at 1 p.m. Sunday at Book Passage at 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. in Corte Madera. She will be in conversation with the late couple’s daughter, Daria Halprin. Admission is free. More information at bookpassage.com.

East Bay architect William Wurster designed the mid-century modern house for the couple in the early 1950s. Lawrence Halprin, one of the world’s leading landscape architects and environmental planners, designed the landscape. The property’s expansive deck, known as the “dance deck,” was designed for Anna Halprin, a dance pioneer, to hold her choreography work and dance classes.

The book focuses on four objects from their Kentfield home — stairs, decks, chairs and windows — as a way to understand what they brought to American art.

Show off

If you have a beautiful or interesting Marin garden or a newly designed Marin home, I’d love to know about it.

Please send an email describing either one (or both), what you love most about it and a photograph or two. I will post the best ones in upcoming columns. Your name will be published, and you must be over 18 years old and a Marin resident.

PJ Bremier writes on home, garden, design and entertaining topics every Saturday. She may be contacted at P.O. Box 412, Kentfield 94914, or at pj@pjbremier.com.