It's easy to find merchandise related to Frank Lloyd Wright- all you need to do is search on the auction sites, or Google Wright's name. The hits would seem to indicate that there's a world of stuff out there that Wright designed, that all you need do to achieve connection to Wright is to fill in your Visa number and wait for the UPS man. As the Gershwins and DuBose Heyward wrote, it ain't necessarily so.

A recent check of the most popular auction site showed over five hundred "Wright" items available, but that scarcely a dozen had any direct connection with Wright. What does that mean? It means that most of the items were somehow indirectly associated with Wright in the minds of sellers, but that items actually designed by Wright, or reproduced as Wright intended for them to be, were scarce indeed.

It seems that anyone who can work stained glass advertises a "Frank Lloyd Wright-style" sun-catcher or lamp. Wright window designs are Big with auction buyers, evidently. There are Christmas ornaments that are based on motifs in the windows of the Winslow House. You can have coasters that mimic the windows of the Thomas House. Candleholders use designs from the Moore House's windows, and a battery-operated pendulum clock is silk-screened with the bubbling circles of the Coonley Playhouse windows.

Not enough windows for you? Perhaps you'd like an afghan printed with a Wright window design. Or switchplates laser-cut with another window's motif. Or a vase silk-screened with the windows of the Martin House. Wright designed none of these things, no matter what the cleverly written ad copy would have you believe.

And there's plenty more. You can buy ties, tea sets shaped like the Guggenheim Museum, and clocks "inspired" by the siding on the Jacobs House. Some of these things are the result of wishful thinking on the part of designers, amateur and pro, who believe that Wright's work was a style, not a way of life. Some of them are authorized by organizations who actually own the rights to Wright. What's really Wright? What's not? Is the imprimatur of some organization or other a guarantee of authenticity? If Wright drew a design, is it okay to use it in ways other than that Wright intended?

The answer is in Wright's own philosophy, his way of approaching design and architecture. The guiding force behind his work was his principle of "organic architecture", a natural and inevitable way of responding to a site, those who would live on it, and what materials were suitable to the place. In Wright's scheme of things, a leaded window was intended for multiple purposes. Its design was often meant to mirror organic features of the site, such as the sumac design found in the windows of the Dana House; sumac is a plant native to the area in which the house was built. The Dana House's windows were intended to act as a lens for the landscape surrounding the building, drawing the eye to their semi-abstract representations of Nature, then out past those representations to Nature itself. They were intended to create patterns of sunlight within a specific building's interior, patterns that could exist nowhere else, because no other building on Earth would have exactly the same siting and orientation as the one for which the window was intended. A Wright window was put into existence to become part of an intricate fabric, part natural, part embellishment of Nature- compliment and contrast.

When the intent behind Wright's work is perceived, then other uses of a Wright pattern are clearly seen for what they are- misappropriation or copying of something significant to create a trifle. A Wright window design is meant to be a window, not a stone-and-metal coaster shoved under someone's Bud Light. The board-and-batten siding of the first Jacobs House was intended to cast unique shadow patterns there, not to be miniaturized as a mantel clock housing. That is not to say that Wright's work cannot be reproduced- it can be, and it is- but it works best when it is reproduced exactly, and for its intended purpose.

Wright-designed china is available from several sources, copying china designed for the Imperial Hotel and other projects. China is, by its nature, a portable object, and can have an existence outside of the project it was intended to be part of. Wright designed some magnificent crystal starbursts to hold candles; Tiffany revives the design from time to time. Some of Wright's furniture is reproduced exactly, and Wright-designed fabrics have been a mainstay of their authorized manufacturer, Schumacher, for decades. All these examples, and others, are things that can have many purposes in many different houses, exactly as Wright designed them.

In general, when shopping for Wright-related merchandise, it's good to ask the following questions:

• Is the design something Wright designed exactly as you see it? Or does the word "adaptation" appear somewhere?
  
• "Adaptations" are tricky. It's sometimes possible to adapt a design in positive ways, such as scaling a piece of furniture down somewhat to fit today's smaller spaces. But as we've seen, it's also possible to adapt a window or other motif into any number of chatchkes, and those uses of a design are generally not so desirable.
  
• Has something been altered to make it cheaper to manufacture? There are miniaturized glass copies of Wright's windows that are sold as "suncatchers", silk-screened with the design instead of using leaded glass as Wright did.
  
• Know what the word "authorized" means. It means only that a particular entity has the legal right to license a design. It is no guarantee whatever that the design is being sold or used in ways of which the designer would have approved. It also does not guarantee that the licensed use is appropriate to the design.