Just before 3 p.m. Thursday, Brad Pitt got his birthday gift from Angelina Jolie as the most famous couple in the world arrived in snowy Mill Run, Pa., to tour Fallingwater. “He’s so hard to buy for,” Jolie told Fallingwater’s Curator of Education Cara Armstrong and Event Coordinator Edna King during the hour-long drive the four shared together from Latrobe Airport to Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterwork. “Brad said he had wanted to experience Fallingwater ever since he took an architectural history course in college,” Armstrong said. “He and I talked quite a bit about design and art. It was amazing how well informed he was about architecture, which was great for me since I’m an ‘architecture geek.’” “Cara and Brad chatted about architecture on the whole trip to Fallingwater,” King said. “You could see the two of them were in heaven.” When they arrived, the couple took a two-hour focus tour led by Armstrong who described the couple as “very gracious and very engaged in the house. As we say in the midwest, you could tell their mothers raised them right.” “Brad said he had a visual sense of Fallingwater but experiencing it in person, hearing the sound of the waterfall cascading under the house and smelling the wood from the fireplace, was better than anything he could have imagined,” Armstrong said. After the tour, Angelina had arranged to have champagne and caviar sent in, which the couple shared in a private birthday celebration in Fallingwater’s living room. Afterward, they invited the staff to join them and encouraged Armstrong and King to take the “snacks” home with them. Arrangements for this impromptu birthday bash began about a week before Thanksgiving when King received a call from Jolie’s personal assistant in Asia. The assistant was reluctant to provide the names of the couple but relented when King assured her she would be discreet. Aside from King and Armstrong, only Fallingwater’s Director Lynda Waggoner knew of their December 7 arrival. The couple was to travel by helicopter from New York originally, but snowy weather conditions necessitated chartering a private jet and then being driven by SUV (with tinted windows) to Fallingwater. Armstrong said the couple enjoyed the ride over, and both remarked how beautiful they thought the Laurel Highlands looked in winter. A National Historic Landmark and an official project of the Save America’s Treasures program, Fallingwater was designated the Commonwealth Treasure of 2000 by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In 2001, National Geographic Traveler magazine named Fallingwater one of 50 “Places of a Lifetime.” On November 2, the National Trust for Historic Preservation honored the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy for Excellence of Stewardship of Historic Sites, commemorating its ongoing preservation work at Fallingwater.
WPXI
Ahhhh, she knows him so well and they are so in love! Actually that is really sweet! And you know Jennifer Aniston would never have done that for him!
