In the woods of Willoughby Hills, Ohio, a Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast purchased in 2018 the RiverRock property where, in 1959, the master of organic architecture had envisaged building the house known, in Taliesin's archives, as Project #5909, which remained unfinished and was meticulously re-proposed in its material and figurative characters by a new construction completed in 2025.

The contemporary work takes from the original the lexicon of the “Usonian” house: a term coined by Wright himself, and used by him in more than a hundred houses from the 1930s onwards, which defined a typically ‘’US‘’ concept of living readable in buildings with an open layout and markedly horizontal volume, made of natural materials (wood and stone), with a strong aesthetic impact but functional and affordable.

The new building is characterised by a long, lowered volume clad in river stone with a roughly P-shaped plan, partially embedded in the ground and with a large roof overhang; a sequence of fluid spaces marks out the rituals of living, from the common areas irradiated with light through the full-height windows, to the more intimate and shadowy spaces of the three bedrooms. A palette of rough and natural materials, from the wood of the furnishings and fixtures to the rough stone of the shells, gives the dwelling a warm and enveloping character.

Despite the attempt at a “philological” re-proposition of the spirit and forms of Wright's design, one of the last of the Usonian houses, the work was rejected by institutional bodies such as the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conversancy, which dissociated themselves from the intervention calling it a “derivative” “interpretation” of the original concept.

Merit judgments on the process from which it emerged aside, the house is for rent (like the neighbouring Louis Penfield Home dating from 1955, also by Wright) in case anyone wants to experience, if not the charm of the original, at least the suggestion of the copy.

Cover, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rosenbaum House, Florence, Alabama, USA 1940. Photo Carol M. Highsmith from Wikipedia