The Penfield House: Frank Lloyd Wright Builds for a Giant
Near Cleveland, Ohio
Hidden in the wooded bluffs of Willoughby Hills sits one of the stranger commissions in Frank Lloyd Wright's long career, a house built because a very tall man made a very direct challenge.
In nineteen fifty-two, a Lake County artist named Louis Penfield and his wife Pauline visited Taliesin, Wright's Wisconsin studio. Penfield was six feet eight inches tall, a size that made ordinary houses feel like furniture designed for someone else. He told the eighty-five-year-old architect he doubted Wright could design a house that would actually fit a man his size. Wright, who was not known for backing down from a dare, took the commission.
Six months later, Penfield received the plans. Wright designed what he called a Usonian house, his term for modest, organically integrated homes intended for middle-class American families rather than wealthy patrons. But this one was tailored precisely to Penfield's scale. Doorways were raised. Ceilings were lifted in all the places where a man of six-eight would move through his day. The floating staircase is anchored to ceiling beams rather than the floor, giving it an airborne quality that doubles as a functional solution for a narrow entry. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls in the living room frame a panoramic view of the Chagrin River bluffs.
The house was built from heavy concrete blocks with deeply raked horizontal mortar joints, a technique Wright used to emphasize the horizontal line he considered native to the American landscape. Penfield agreed to a twenty-five-thousand-dollar budget and stopped construction the moment it was reached, which meant some of Wright's custom-designed cabinetry and furniture never got built. His son Paul later completed the furniture set from Wright's original drawings.
The house is one of nine Usonian structures Wright designed in Ohio and sits on the National Register of Historic Places. It has been offered to overnight guests as a rental, meaning occasional visitors have spent the night inside a Wright original, long ceiling beams overhead, the bluff woods pressing in on every side, doorways built for a man who refused to stoop.
