WILLOUGHBY HILLS, Ohio — Frank Lloyd Wright left his last residential home design on nine pages of paper.
Mother-daughter duo Sarah Dykstra and Deborah Dykstra are now taking these sketches off the page and onto their property in Willoughby Hills.
“I remember, I kept saying over and over, ‘I can't believe this hasn't built. I can't believe this hasn't been built. Why hasn't this been built? Mom, we need to buy it. We need to do this,’” said Sarah Dykstra, who is the house owner.
The family has been building homes in Lake County for more than a century, Deborah Dykstra said, starting with her father in 1914. Still, taking on Wright’s final design six decades after his death wasn’t always a part of their plans.
The pair said it started with buying one of a handful of Frank Lloyd Wright properties in Ohio: the Louis Penfield House. The property included Wright’s 50-page specification book, his sketches and the right to build the imagined home.
“This property came with three houses, two [of which] we had two completely rehab and make livable for us,"" Deborah Dykstra said. "And then in the bench seat of the Penfield house were the plans for this house.”
The RiverRock House is now bringing life to Wright’s famous architectural principles, like compression and release.
“You can kind of see other ways of walking towards, and it pushes you to where you're get the other part of the equation, which is the release,” Sarah Dykstra said.
Along with connecting the indoors with the outdoors.
“One of the things that he always said is that he wants a home built of the land, not on the land. So it's really integrated … the big glass walls and the ceiling that kind of disappears out into nature,” Sarah Dykstra said.
But, the Dykstras didn’t do it all alone. They worked with architects to decipher all of Wright’s design details from 1959.
Through the process, the team made several changes to the original plans to keep up with modern engineering standards and codes.
“Because there were so few drawings, again, nine drawings for this house, there were a lot of details that we had to figure out. So we looked at other Wright houses, did a lot of field trips trying to interpret what he might have done,” said on-site architect Robert Shearer.
Despite making modifications, Shearer said the team was committed to keeping the architecture as authentic as possible.
“Anything that we changed kind of happened under the skin,” he said. “So that at the end of the day, when you look at it, what you're seeing is Mr. Wright's vision and not our 2023, 2024 interpretation of what he did.”
Moving forward, Sarah Dykstra said they hope to continue preserving Wright’s legacy by opening RiverRock’s doors to the next generation.
“5909 was his last residential project,” she said. “And trying to stick with that plan of the period, and even bringing in all the artifacts that design the house and decorate the house, I think take people back to that time to him.”
