You Can Finally Stay at This Stunning Frank Lloyd Wright Home (Take a Look Inside!)
If you’ve always dreamed of living in a Frank Lloyd Wright home but have been bested at every turn by their rarity and cost, I found the perfect vacation for you: You can spend a weekend at the newly built FLW RiverRock house in Willoughby Hills, Ohio — one of his final Usonian homes, which just finished construction in early 2025.
The RiverRock house is actually claimed to be Wright’s final residential commission, and “was the only ‘unbuilt’ Frank Lloyd Wright design that still had its original building site available,” per the RiverRock site.
RiverRock is also only a few hundred yards from another FLW Usonian home — the eponymous Louis Penfield House.
But just shortly after Penfield was built, per “family legend,” the home was threatened by a possible case of eminent domain — a highway was being built nearby. So the family apparently wrote to Wright, then 91 years old, asking for another home design commission so they could build another FLW property in the event that their home was reduced to rubble.
Wright managed to deliver them the home plans for what would become RiverRock (the blueprints were apparently sent to the family a week after his death). And in the end, the Penfield House didn’t get torn down. But it wasn’t until Sarah Dykstra bought the entire property decades later in 2018 — Penfield house and all — that the designs for RiverRock started to move from paper to reality, Smithsonian Magazine reports.
As of early 2025, construction on RiverRock is complete. And now, if you’re a FLW-head like I am, you can actually stay there and soak up a piece of FLW history. Per the News-Herald, the home is about 2,000 square feet and has heated floors (awesome!), three bedrooms, and one-and-a-half baths.
Dykstra told the News-Herald that building the property was a challenge. Because no one in FLW’s core team is still alive, the team building the RiverRock house had to make modern decisions about “who can make interpretations from the original architect, what modifications must be made to meet modern building codes, and how are those incorporated while preserving the master design.”
Apparently, for example, Wright’s design required “locally quarried stone,” so even though the Penfields never built the property, Louis Penfield collected “bins of rock” from the Chagrin River in case it ever was.
The property is available for stays starting at $800 a night. As for me, I may wait to book until the next winter rolls around — I can imagine myself heading to RiverRock on a snowy night, sitting on that gorgeous heated floor in front of the working fireplace, with a book and a glass of red wine.
If you’re anxious to get to RiverRock but the property is too booked out for you, there’s also always, of course, the Penfield House — just a few steps away, which starts at $450 a night but is just as popular.
Happy FLW house-hunting!