WILLOUGHBY HILLS, Ohio – It won’t be easy for Paul Penfield to let go of the house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his father, Louis.
It was in 1953 that Louis, a Mayfield High School art teacher and a man of modest means, realized the outrageous dream of commissioning a house from one of the world’s greatest architects.
View full sizeA portrait of Frankl Lloyd Wright hangs near the entrance of Penfield House.
Born in 1944, Paul got to spend his teen years in the house after it was completed in 1955 – or more precisely, after his parents exhausted the $25,000 they set aside for the project without having enough to finish the built-in benches and shelves Wright had designed.
Paul played with his friends and sister Tisa in the wheat fields along the Chagrin River that eventually turned into the towering stands of pine, oak and maple that now enfold the graceful structure. And as an adult, Paul inherited the house and finished the interior details his parents couldn’t afford.
Since 2003, Penfield and his wife, Donna, who live in nearby Willoughby, have rented the house to visitors for $275 on weeknights and $300 on weekends as one of a small number of Wright dwellings in the United States available for overnight stays. He said the house is committed nearly 300 nights a year.
Yet after having spent most of his life connected to a beautiful piece of design, Penfield has decided it’s time to sell.
In May, he placed the two-story, three-bedroom house on the market, asking $1.7 million for it and two other houses on 18.45 acres off River Road, just south of I-90.
“I’m 70 years old,” he said during a recent conversation in the living room of the house. “It’s time to get the property into the hands of the next owner, who can then move it forward.”
View full sizeLiving a-la Wright: the living room of Penfield House.
Selling a Wright house is never routine. Penfield House is real estate, but it’s also a piece of cultural patrimony listed on National Register of Historic Places and mentioned in numerous books and websites.
Penfield knows what it’s like to carry that load. A former carpenter who once traveled Europe as an itinerant rock musician, Penfield knew in 1998 when he decided to finish the interior of the house and add furniture following Wright’s designs that his work would be scrutinized down to the inch.
“You worry about it a long time when you approach Frank Lloyd Wright,” Penfield said in a 2007 interview, “because you have a whole lot of invisible people standing over your shoulder, most of whom are art historians.”
Wright, who died in 1959, continues to inspire reverence for his Mozartean creativity, despite his propensity to mythologize himself, to lie about everything including his age, and to disregard clients’ needs.
The architect’s less-than-savory personal life, which included seducing and running off with the wife of a client, contributed to a roller-coaster career in which he was considered too hot to hire for years at a time.
Yet Wright surged back into the spotlight in a career with numerous phases, bearing a new style each time.
Designed toward the end of Wright’s career, Penfield House embodies major themes that characterize his work.
It has the earth-hugging, horizontal lines of the architect’s famous Prairie houses, which blended 19th-century nature worship with modernist innovation and ideas borrowed from Japanese art and architecture.
Built with concrete block, wood trim and wood-fiber panels, the house also features the interlocking vertical and horizontal forms that echo, however distantly, the Froebel block system that Wright had played with as a child.
The Penfield is also part of a series of so-called Usonian houses, a term invented by Wright to indicate a fresh, new, American way of living.
View full sizeThe “floating” stairs in Penfield House have no risers, all the better to create a sense of transparency and spatial flow.
Approximately 60 Usonian houses sprang up all over the country from 1936 until Wright’s death in 1959. Nine are in Ohio, including Oberlin College’s Weltzheimer House, which is open for tours twice a month from April to November.
“Scores of variation on the basic [Usonian] theme sped from the drafting rooms of one or the other of the two Taliesins [Wright homes and studios in Wisconsin and Arizona],” wrote Brendan Gill in his acerbic 1987 biography of the architect, “Many Masks.”
Like other Usonians, the 1,800-square-foot Penfield House has a carport instead of a garage and an “open plan” interior anchored by a hearth, with a series of flowing, undivided spaces that link the entry hall, kitchen, dining and living areas.
What’s unique about the Penfield House is that Wright broke his usual habit of designing low ceiling heights to complement his relatively modest, 5-foot-8-inch stature.
Louis Penfield stood a full foot taller than the architect, so Wright accommodated with a living room that has a 12-foot ceiling. The house consequently feels loftier than other Usonians.
Apart from his missionary zeal to spread his vision across the country, Wright cranked out Usonians, Gill wrote, to raise cash to support his lavish, perpetually overextended lifestyle.
It was a nuance Paul Penfield grew to understand as an adult studying the history of the house, and of the second home Louis Penfield persuaded Wright to design for an adjacent piece of land.
As Paul tells the story — and as his father’s letters reveal — Louis Penfield was devastated in 1956 to learn that highway engineers planned to build I-90 virtually right over the house.
View full sizeA photo of a model for the unbuilt Riverrock House intended for Louis Penfield’s property in Willoughby Hills.
Luckily, the highway planners moved the right-of-way 500 feet to the north, saving the house. Nevertheless, Louis Penfield prevailed upon Wright to design a second house for an adjacent parcel about 500 feet further south of the first one, further away from the highway and its noise.
Wright agreed, Paul now surmises, to keep the Usonian cash machine going, right up to the end. A tube of rolled-up blueprints for the second house arrived in Willoughby Hills days after Wright’s death, along with news that the architect’s business faced millions in unpaid taxes.
“They were cash-strapped all the time,” Penfield said.
Louis Penfield never raised the money to build the second house, called Riverrock. The design calls for a graceful, wedge-shaped structure with a stony prow jutting toward the Chagrin River like the bow of a racing yacht.
Yet Paul Penfield owns both the right to build the plans, and the 10.7-acre site for which the second house was intended. He’d part with both for $700,000 on top of the $1.7 million he’s asking for the existing houses on the adjacent 18 acres.
Penfield’s pitch is that he calls Riverrock the world’s last available original building site for an unbuilt Wright house. Investors could earn a tidy income if the second house were built and the pair could be marketed together either as rentals or as part of a conference center, he said.
Penfield himself launched an effort several years ago to create a nonprofit organization to raise money to build Riverrock and to turn both Wright houses into a joint conference center.
But the recession put an end to those plans, and now, he said, it’s time to find a new owner to carry one or both of the Penfield houses – built and unbuilt – into the future.
The primary Willoughby Hills property, as Penfield announced in May when he launched the sale, includes Ward Farmhouse, a five-bedroom duplex; plus an 850-square-foot cottage with a kitchenette and a loft bedroom.
The $1.7 million asking is not, as Penfield states, unusual within the world of Wright real estate.
View full sizeDetails: The lower clerestory window on the west side of Penfield House admit light to the kitchen inside, and also wraps around the south corner of the house, allowing light into the interior from two directions and drawing the eye to the corner.
The Save Wright page on the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy website lists 14 buildings on sale across the United States for prices as high as $3.9 million for the famous, Mayan-inspired “La Miniatura” in Los Angeles.
Penfield, who is not using a real estate agent, has had five showings and no offers so far. Some Wright houses, he said, have been on the market for as long as five years. He’s hoping to sell within a year.
“We’re not in a position where we have to rush,” he said.
Whenever he sells, Penfield hopes that the new owner will continue to rent the house so visitors can enjoy the rare experience of living – however briefly – under a Wright roof.
“There’s a lot of architecture here,” he said. “You could spend hours looking at the shadows moving across planes of reference.”
Even today, Penfield can’t look at the house without marveling at his father’s moxie in approaching Wright, and making architectural history in Willoughby Hills.
“I think it’s extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary,” he said. “When you’re younger, you assume adults do what they do and you don’t think about it. Doing what he did here was phenomenal.”