The renowned American architect Frank Lloyd Wright had a number of unfinished plans for big projects in the works when he died, from a sports club in Hollywood to a department store for Ahmedabad, India, and an urban plan for Greater Baghdad. He may be best known for ambitious structures like New York’s Guggenheim Museum and the Pennsylvania home known as Fallingwater, but it so happens that a modest Ohio home for an art teacher and his wife was literally on the drawing board at the time of his death, in April 1959.
This past January, a house based on those designs, dubbed RiverRock, rose at 2217 River Road in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, 20 minutes east of downtown Cleveland. Sarah Dykstra purchased an existing Wright house on the property and the plans for RiverRock in 2018, according to the Epoch Times, and is renting both properties out for visitors. For $800 per night, Wright admirers get the whole three-bedroom, two-bath RiverRock house; it accommodates six comfortably, according to the listings page. It measures about 2,000 square feet and features a glass-walled living room. It was the only unbuilt design with its original building site available, say the owners.
The only catch? Per a statement on its website, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation dismisses projects like this, saying that “newly constructed or reconstructed projects that are based on designs, sketches, working drawings, and/or photographs of Wright’s work cannot faithfully represent the intentions of Wright himself.” Erecting one of his unbuilt designs today, the statement points out, “will necessarily require varying degrees of interpretation as to how Wright would himself have constructed the project, or used materials now available for such works, in today’s building environment.”
“The RiverRock home is not Frank Lloyd Wright’s work—varying due to codes, materials, and other differences,” said a representative of the foundation in an email. “Although it is true that the RiverRock drawings were some of Wright’s last, the current construction varies from the actual plans designed by Wright. It’s a derivative of the original plan.”
Dykstra did not respond to messages sent via the house’s website.
Dykstra, in statements to the press, seemed to acknowledge the very problem the foundation points out, but indicates that as long as the building looks the same, no harm, no foul.
“When we set out to build this home, we gave a mandate to the professional team involved: if you must change something due to current building regulations, code, products, etc., do so under the ‘skin’ so the house will look exactly the same,” Dykstra, owner and co-general contractor, told the News-Herald. “The design and the artistic aspect of this home should remain the same as intended in 1959.”
RiverRock is actually the second home Wright designed for the same family. Art teacher Louis Penfield and his wife Pauline commissioned a house from the architect in 1953. The legend, as the owner’s website explained, goes that the Penfields were visiting Wright’s studio in 1952 when they happened to encounter the master himself, and the very tall Penfield boldly asked if Wright could design a house for someone his height. Wright, who stood five feet eight inches tall, often designed low-ceilinged rooms and hallways that created a “compression and release” contrast with the more expansive common areas.
Wright asked his aspiring patron to stand under a nearby beam, thought a moment, and said, “That beam’s six foot nine inches high, so you’re six foot eight. Anyone that tall is a weed. We’ll have to build a machine to tip you sideways!” And he walked off. Six months later, out of nowhere, Penfield received preliminary drawings. Wright had, so to speak, risen to the challenge: The house featured unusually high ceilings and 16 vertical ribbon windows that would accentuate Penfield’s height.
If you’re wondering how an art teacher could afford a home by the man the American Institute of Architects dubbed the “greatest American architect of all time,” there’s an answer: This was one of the architect’s so-called Usonian homes, which he conceived of after the Great Depression in order to provide beautiful homes for people of varying income levels. What resulted was the 1953 Louis Penfield House. The three-bedroom, two-bath house is also available for rent, starting at just $450 a night.
In 1959, Wright designed RiverRock for the Penfields after the part of the 30-acre property where the Penfield House stood was going to be seized under eminent domain to build a highway. (The plan for the road was later changed, saving the house.) The new home would stand several hundred feet south of the first.
Wright originally responded that at 91, he was no longer designing houses, but he made an exception for the Penfields as previous clients. When Wright died in April, the Penfields assumed the commission was no more, but the same week as the architect’s funeral, his studio sent the couple the architect’s designs in the mail. It was filed away as Project #5909 in the Taliesin Archives, Wright’s office.
The design required locally sourced rock, so Penfield retrieved rocks from the Chagrin River, which runs through the property, thus inspiring the name of the home; the Dykstras, they said, came upon the cache of rocks in the woods near the home, incorporated them into the structure, and kept Penfield’s preferred name.
“Wright did more than design structures,” Debbie Dykstra, Sarah’s mother and the co-general contractor, told the News-Herald. “He created living works of art and dotted them into nature.”
In the end, she seems to suggest that it should be up to lodgers to decide whether the house is legitimate.
“We feel Wright’s legacy has been both honored and broadened by the construction team,” she said. “Our intention, by opening the home for overnight stays, is to allow guests to decide for themselves. We hope they see and feel what we do from RiverRock.”
