River Rock House

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Willoughby Hills, OH

River Rock House has a very interesting story behind it. It began Louis Penfield contracted Frank Lloyd Wright contracted Frank Lloyd Wright to build his house in 1952. Shortly after, Penfield was to lose this house to the construction of I-90, which was to roll right through where his house was located. So, Penfield asked Wright for a new home design. This home was to be built near the first home. At 91, Wright had stopped designing houses, but as a favor to Louis, Wright designed it for him. However, this wasn’t discovered until after Frank had died. The week of his funeral a mailing tube with drawings arrived from Taliesin. They had been on the drawing board when Wright died in 1959. It was Wright’s last residential commission.

How it came to eventually be built has been made into documentary called “The Last Wright.” In short, mother-daughter team, Sarah and Debbie Dykstraset, set out to build it.  The name River Rock came from the the plans which required locally quarried stone. Lou Penfield collected buckets of rock from the Chagrin River after which Frank told him that the house shall be named “RiverRock’”. The rocks, harvested were later found in the woods by the Dykstras and incorporated into the build.

RiverRock was finished in 2025 and now open to rent.

A word of warning though, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conversancy contest RiverRock’s authenticity. Their claim is it deviates too much from its original plans to be considered a true ‘Wright’, describing it instead as an ‘interpretation’ and ‘derivative’. This might be true, due to today’s building standards, but it’s still a cool house that got the gist of the original plans.

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