Early in his career Wright had designed houses and commercial buildings for clients with a wide range of wealth, from middle class families to rich businessmen. After World War I, Frank Lloyd Wright, along with many architects around the world, started to think about ways to design houses that more people could afford. Wright experimented with designs made of concrete blocks that were stamped with different patterns. The blocks could be arranged in different ways to create walls and windows. The patterns could be rotated to make interesting designs on the inside and outside. He built four of these "textile block" houses in California based on this idea. They wound up being fairly expensive houses, but he kept thinking about designing affordable architecture based on the repetition of a standard unit.