For Monica Vitti, Eileen Gray and Frank Lloyd Wright, their homes were the culmination of passionate affairs. And the places they ended.

SOME OF MY FAVORITE STORIES are stories of houses. “The Spoils of Poynton,” about a house full of beloved antiquities. “Rebecca,” about a house haunted by a first wife. Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”: a house that takes over parenting. I love James Lees-Milne’s stories of National Trust houses, postwar stories of houses built on dynasties and coming apart. Then there is the special house, the one built on love, for a muse, a mistress, an adored spouse. In Virginia Woolf’s brief masterpiece “A Haunted House,” the ghosts are content, the walls of the house thrumming with whispers of peace, a happy marriage.

But so, too, can a house be haunted by a disappointment, by expired love, curdled, lending an imperceptible perfume to the halls and rooms. It is the whiff we catch at open houses and estate sales, whose occupants have divorced. According to 1 Corinthians, love is patient, love is kind. According to Joy Division, love will tear us apart. What happens when a couple outgrows a house, when they wake in a beloved room to realize they don’t belong there, that they’ve been living an illustration of a dream?

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The abandoned interior of La Cupola, as it looked in 2015.
The abandoned interior of La Cupola, as it looked in 2015. - ....  in the early 1970s, it was the setting for the love affair between Vitti and Antonioni.The idea for the dome started with the architect Bini, who had acquired a patent for what he called a “Binishell” in 1964: a building technique that involved a house-size plastic balloon and a metal scaffolding. The balloon was covered with concrete and then inflated. When the concrete hardened, the balloon was removed and doors and windows cut into the dome. The result looked like a laboratory for eccentric experiments involving exotic magnetic forces.
The bedroom of E.1027, the Mediterranean residence Eileen Gray built in 1929 for her lover, the architect Jean Badovici.
The bedroom of E.1027, the Mediterranean residence Eileen Gray built in 1929 for her lover, the architect Jean Badovici. - EILEEN GRAY WAS 51 YEARS OLD when she completed her first private residence. It was a white Modernist villa on a slope descending to the sea in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, a small village on the Côte d’Azur. Her lover, the Romanian architect and editor of L’Architecture Vivante, Jean Badovici, was 36 when they moved in, in 1929.
Wright’s bedroom essentially as it looks today.
Wright’s bedroom essentially as it looks today. - TALIESIN WAS A REFUGE. In 1911, when Frank Lloyd Wright built this house near Spring Green, Wis., where his mother’s family had lived since the Civil War, he was persona non grata in Chicago, and so was the woman for whom he built the house, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. They had met in 1903 when Cheney’s husband commissioned Wright to build their new family home in Oak Park, Ill. The house was finished within a year, and Wright and Cheney began an affair. They kept it secret, but in 1909 they left their spouses and embarked on a trip to Europe. There, Mamah (now Borthwick again) worked on the English translation of “The Morality of Woman,” by the Swedish feminist and suffragette Ellen Key.