A house based on the designs found on Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawing board at Taliesin West, the architect’s Arizona winter home and studio when he passed away in 1959, has finally been completed—and it’s available for overnight stays.
Called RiverRock House, Wright’s final residential commission recently opened on 30 wooded acres in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, a suburb 20 minutes east of downtown Cleveland.
The fully equipped, 2,000-square-foot house has three bedrooms (with two queen and two XL twin beds), one and three-quarter baths, a wood-burning stone fireplace, and a glass-walled living room with sweeping views of the property. Like many of Wright’s homes, it leans into his concept of organic architecture—buildings that appear to grow naturally from their surroundings—and focuses on open floor plans, clean lines, and the use of natural materials.
The blueprints were made for Louis Penfield, an artist and schoolteacher, who originally commissioned Wright to design The Penfield House, a modified version of his Usonian homes (a type of post-Depression era affordable housing), to accommodate Penfield’s six-foot, eight-inch frame. When a new interstate was threatened to be built on Penfield’s property, however, he reached out to Wright to inquire about a second home. By then, Wright, who had stopped building residential homes, agreed only because Penfield was a former client, according to The Penfield House’s website. It wasn’t until after Wright’s death that Penfield received a surprise package with the blueprints inside. The roadway never came to fruition, though, and Penfield didn’t need to use the designs.
It wasn’t until 2018, when Sarah Dykstra, a general contractor, purchased Penfield House and the blueprints for RiverRock (known then as Project #5909), that the plans were put into motion.
Over his nearly seven-decade career, Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than 1,000 buildings, including public structures like New York’s Guggenheim Museum and a Pennsylvania museum known as Fallingwater (both now UNESCO World Heritage Sites), and hundreds of private residences, some of which are open for visitors to tour or book for an overnight stay. (Others are grouped close enough together that architecture and design lovers can make a roadtrip out of seeing them.) RiverRock wasn’t the only one that remained unbuilt after his death; more than 650 projects were left uncompleted, including a mile-high skyscraper planned for downtown Chicago called The Illinois.
Dykstra told Ohio’s News-Herald the house looks exactly as Wright planned, though with some invisible alterations to meet current building regulations. Whether the house “counts” as part of Wright’s oeuvre has been up for debate since the residence was completed. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website includes a statement on unbuilt projects: “While contemporary architectural designs by others inspired by the work Wright created during his lifetime continue to broaden his legacy, 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.” The statement notes that the designs would likely “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.”
Still, Debbie Dykstra, Sarah Dykstra’s mother and another general contractor who worked on RiverRock, told The News-Herald, “We feel Wright’s legacy has been both honored and broadened by the construction team. 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.”
Both RiverRock and The Penfield House are available for overnight stays (starting at $800 and $450 per night, respectively, each with a two-night minimum).
