One of the nine Usonian Homes that Prairie School pope Frank Lloyd Wright built in Ohio just careened onto the market, offered with two other cottages on 18.45 acres for a total of $1.7M. The Louis Penfield House of Willoughby Hills was completed 1955, when Wright was a little over halfway through his Usonian series—a bunch of small, mostly flat-roofed single-story homes he created with the aim of making his designs more accessible to middle-income families—and has since become something of "a go-to brag of architecture and Lake County tourism enthusiasts," as The News-Herald tells it. Pictured on one of the best meta-local-news single-topic Tumblrs with owner Paul Penfield posing in front, the 1,800-square-foot abode has, according to Penfield, the odd fate of sitting next to a lot that was to be the site of Wright's last-ever residential commission.
Paul's father Louis Penfield, a high school art teacher, eventually commissioned a second home from Wright when Interstate 90 threatened to slice through the property containing his first. The highway was redirected, and the Riverrock House was never built, but Penfield—who claims that the plans for it were literally on Wright's drawing board when he died, and were mailed to his father the week of the funeral—is apparently waiting to sell the drawings and the extra lot to "someone with the correct mission and finances." Anyway, Penfield and his wife currently rent out the Louis Penfield House for $275 a night, and he's done some renovations on it himself. For more on its history, check out the official site. (Headphones are recommended to fully experience the backing acoustic track, which has a recording of Wright himself overlaid on top.) In other Wright news, a slew of Chicago-area homes he designed are still looking for buyers—in addition to a few others around the country—and he thought Le Corbusier's famous church looked like an "an angel cake punched full of holes."
· Willoughby Hills house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for sale [New Herald via Local People With Their Arms Crossed]
· All Frank Lloyd Wright coverage [Curbed National]
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