You Can Spend a Night in the Last House Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Before His Death in 1959
The plans for the RiverRock house in northeastern Ohio were left on Wright’s drawing board when he died. But whether the project counts as a true “Wright” is up for debate
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In 1952, an Ohio art teacher and his wife visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin studio in Wisconsin. As Wright’s secretary gave Louis and Pauline Penfield a tour of the studio, the master architect himself popped out.
According to Penfield family legend, Louis stepped forth with a challenge. “Mr. Wright, could you design a house for someone as tall as me?” he asked.
“Go stand under that beam,” Wright told Louis. “That beam’s 6 foot 9 inches high, so you’re 6-foot-8. Anyone that tall is a weed. We’ll have to build a machine to tip you sideways!”
Wright turned and left. The Penfields assumed the matter was closed. Six months later, however, a mailing tube from Wright arrived in the post. Inside was a plan for the Louis Penfield House, one of Wright’s celebrated Usonian homes, designed to fit the common man’s budget—and, in Penfield’s case, a tall man’s height.
After the Penfields completed work on their new home in northeastern Ohio in 1955, construction on Interstate 90 threatened to take over the property via eminent domain.
The couple wrote to Wright again, requesting a second home design for a plot several hundred feet south of the Penfield House. Wright, who was 91 years old at the time, allegedly replied that he already had enough projects to last the rest of his life, but he promised he would come “in under the wire” because the Penfields were former clients.
Wright died not long after, in April 1959. Once again, the Penfields assumed the matter was shut. But the week of the architect’s funeral, another mailing tube arrived from Taliesin. This time, it contained Project 5909, a second design for the Penfields that was discovered on Wright’s drawing board after his death.
That, at least, is the story told on the website of RiverRock, the 2,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom house that finally brought Project 5909 to fruition in 2025, 66 years after Wright’s death.
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With tall glass windows built to accommodate Louis’ height, heated floors, a wood-burning fireplace and expansive views of the woods of Willoughby Hills, Ohio, the house is now available for guests to rent at a starting price of $800 per night.
While the Penfields didn’t live to see the house completed, Sarah Dykstra bought the property, which also included the Penfield House (not, in the end, destroyed by the interstate), in 2018. She and her mother, Deborah Dykstra, began developing the Penfields’ dream into reality in 2023.
“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,” Sarah tells the Willoughby News-Herald’s Marah Morrison.
As with much of Wright’s work, the second Penfield home was designed to be integrated with its natural surroundings. Wright called for large quantities of local stone, which the Penfields harvested from the nearby Chagrin River, giving the house its name of RiverRock.
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“We were talking about pivoting the house so this glass would face more to the river,” Sarah told the News-Herald’s Morrison at a ribbon cutting ceremony at RiverRock earlier this month. But her mother advised against it.
Wright’s particular orientation for the house—60 degrees off of a poplar tree on the property—was intentional. At noon on the first days of spring and fall, the sunlight hits the exact point where wood and concrete meet.
“Wright did more than design structures,” Deborah tells the News-Herald. “He created living works of art and dotted them into nature.”
While the Dykstras remained as faithful as zoning regulations allowed to Wright’s exacting vision, whether a house created entirely after the architect’s death and updated to fit modern regulations truly belongs in his oeuvre is up for debate.
As the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation notes on its website, “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.”
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“The RiverRock home is not Frank Lloyd Wright’s work—varying due to codes, materials and other differences,” a representative from the foundation tells Artnet’s Brian Boucher. “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.”
But for the Dykstras and the Penfields’ surviving family, RiverRock adheres to Wright’s Usonian spirit, if not perfectly to his every detail.
“All I can say in regard to what they’ve done is how appreciated it would have been by my family,” Paul Penfield, the son of Louis and Pauline, tells the News-Herald. “I’m the only one left, so they would’ve really appreciated it so much and so would Wright. I only met him once. It was great being in his presence—this giant in American art.”
As houses built during Wright’s lifetime age and crumble, projects like RiverRock keep his legacy alive and fresh for posterity.
“Our intention, by opening the home for overnight stays, is to allow guests to decide for themselves,” Deborah tells the News-Herald. “We hope they see and feel what we do from RiverRock.”
