RiverRock House, Willoughby Hills, Ohio, United States,
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 Mr 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. Mr 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.
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.
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.
