The home, based on the designs found in the drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright at Tully Sinn West, the architect’s winter home and studio, when he died in 1959, was finally complete.
Wright’s Final Residential Committee recently opened on a 30-acre acre in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, a suburb 20 minutes east of downtown Cleveland.
The fully equipped 2,000-square-foot home features three bedrooms (with two queens and two XL twin beds), three-quarter baths and three quarter baths, a wood-burning stone fireplace and a glass-walled living room with wide views of the grounds. Like many Wright’s houses, it leaps towards his concept of organic architecture, namely buildings that appear to grow naturally from the surroundings, focusing on open floor plans, clean lines and the use of natural materials.
The blueprint was created for artist and school teacher Louis Penfield. He asked Wright to design Penfield House, the modified version of his Usonian family, to accommodate Penfield’s 6-foot, 8-inch frame. However, when a new interstate was threatened to be built on Penfield’s property, he contacted Wright to inquire about the second home. By then, Wright agreed to stop building the home just because Penfield was a former client, according to the Penfield House website. After Wright’s death, Penfield received a surprise package with a blueprint inside. However, roads never came to fruition and Penfield didn’t need to use design.
Plans went on until 2018 when general contractor Sarah Dykstra purchased the Penfield House and Riverlock blueprint (known at the time as Project #5909).
Over his nearly seven years of career, Frank Lloyd Wright has designed over 1,000 buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Pennsylvania Museum known as the Pennsylvania Museum (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site), known as the Dienwater, hundreds of which are privately owned. (Others are grouped close enough that architecture and design enthusiasts can make road trips from seeing them.) Liberock was not the only person who was not yet excluded after his death. More than 650 projects have been left unfinished, including a planned miles of skyscrapers in downtown Chicago, known as Illinois.
Dykstra told Ohio News Herald The house looks exactly as Wright planned, but there are some invisible changes to meet current building regulations. Whether the house would be “counted” as part of Wright’s work was debated once the residence was completed. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website contains statements about undeveloped projects. “Contemporary architectural design by others, inspired by Wright’s lifelong work, continues to expand his legacy, expanding newly constructed or reconstructed projects based on designs, sketches, work drawings, and/or photographs of Wright’s work,” the statement states that the design “is likely to require varying degrees of interpretation of how Wright himself built the project, or materials that could be used for such works, in today’s building environment.
Still, Debbie Dykstra, Sarah Dykstra’s mother and another general contractor who worked on Liberock said. News Herald“We feel that Wright’s legacy is honored and spread by the construction team. Our intention is to allow guests to decide for themselves by opening a home for an overnight stay. We hope they see and feel what we are doing from Liberock.”
Both Riverrock and Penfield House stay overnight (from $800 and $450 per night, respectively, at a minimum of two nights each).
