A mom and daughter found the lost plans for a Frank Lloyd Wright house — so they built it

Frank Lloyd Wright is a household name in Arizona, designing buildings nearly until his death at the age of 91 in 1959.

Some of his structures have been built based on his designs since his death to varying degrees of success — Debbie and Sarah Dykstra built the very last one.

The mother-and-daughter team undertook the massive job of constructing RiverRock House in Willoughby Hills, Ohio, after finding the plans underneath a seating area of another house he’d designed nearby.

The original building site was still available — designed around a single poplar tree. So, they built it.

It’s all documented on the new series from the Magnolia Network called “The Last Wright.” The spoke with Sarah and Debbie more about it as they sat in the completed RiverRock House.

Full conversation

SARAH DYKSTRA: Back in the mid-50s, Louis Penfield had commissioned and was building his first home. The Ohio Department of Transportation announced the creation of Interstate 90, which was going to destroy his first home that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

So the family went back to Mr. Wright and they asked for a second set of plans to be drawn up for an area on the property a little further south. And they went back and forth and signed contracts and such and then waited and waited a little longer. And then they heard that he had passed away.

But in the process they decided to move I-90 a little further north. So that house was not destroyed, and we still have it. We still own it ourselves now. But lo and behold, a week or so after his funeral, those plans for RiverRock, which ended up being his last archived residential set of plans, arrived at the Penfield House. And so they were kind of like, “OK.”

DEBBIE DYKSTRA: Frank had originally told them to build the same house. And then they said, “no, but we don't want the same house.”

SARAH DYKSTRA: So Louis was like, “I'm an artist too. I need to build something different, so we need a new set of plans.”

GILGER: A new set of plans. They never ended up building that RiverRock House, but you two did. Tell us how you got involved in this.

DEBBIE DYKSTRA: Well, we were all living in Florida at the time. We're from here, but we were all living in Florida at the time and my son was moving to New York City, and once he got there, he told us that, you know, he really wanted to bring his son back here.

So he asked Sarah to start looking for a piece of property or a house that had an in-law suite, so I could go back and forth. And the first thing when she pulled up Realtor.com or whatever that's called was this property. And so we mulled it over back and forth and put our house up for sale, signed for this one, and they both transferred or happened basically within two weeks.

GILGER: My goodness.

DEBBIE DYKSTRA: And then we all came back.

GILGER: OK, wow. So let's talk about taking that on because that is quite an undertaking. The original site was still there and that was important, right? Because if you know anything about Frank Lloyd Wright, you know that he designed the location, almost to a T, like he wanted to build into the environment. This was built around a single tree.

SARAH DYKSTRA: It is. It's built right around a poplar tree, and also known as a tulip tree. And a certain degree off of that tulip tree and about 19 feet away from it, the point of it is.

GILGER: So it's still there, and you start to conceptualize how you're going to do this. What was the first step? I mean, I understand the plans themselves were actually pretty difficult to read, right? 

SARAH DYKSTRA: Yeah, we found many copies of the plans in the bench seating in the Penfield House, and our poor architect for about five months was trying to put the drawings into CAD [computer-aided design]. And having to read those, and then with our production team, they got in touch with the Avery Library out of Columbia [University], and they ended up re-scanning them for us. And now they're crystal clear and it's amazing the detail that's on those set of plans.

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GILGER: So that made it a lot easier, but it's not an easy undertaking. Tell us a little bit about trying to carry this out using the right materials, using the right techniques. I mean, there's code to be taken into consideration now that probably wasn't in existence 60 years ago. 

SARAH DYKSTRA: Sure. We wanted to make it so that it missed a lot of things that Frank is known for, the saggy cantilevers, the leaky roofs, those kinds of things. So, our team that we got together was adamant about making it the best Frank Lloyd Wright house that could be made with 2025 technology.

So we put more steel in the roof, and a bigger block on the interior to support that steel. We used double paned glass everywhere except for where we have a mitered corner glass, but we stuck with the footprint of the plan, the size of the rooms, all of that was kept right with the plans that Frank drew in 1959.

GILGER: I mean, he was famous, or maybe infamous, for being a real stickler about where things go and how they should be built, right? Did you feel a lot of that pressure? 

SARAH DYKSTRA: There was a lot of that pressure, like I don't even know how to describe it. My mom's sitting here and just took a heavy sigh thinking about it.

DEBBIE DYKSTRA: And then, you know, along the way we just discovered that we would not try to alter things and we learned things, we would sit back and go, “why did he do that? Why did he do that?”

SARAH DYKSTRA: And then we'd learn, “oh, that's why he did that. That makes sense now.” And so we had a lot of those discoveries throughout the project, which is really interesting.

GILGER: Tell us about one of those moments. 

SARAH DYKSTRA: So I would say the biggest discovery that we had was with the location of the house. You know, we were so close to the poplar tree. We talked about moving it away from the poplar tree. Should we take the poplar tree down and put it in the same spot? Should we pivot the house on that point and put it more towards the river so it's parallel to the river? And my mom at one point said, “you're trying to be as authentic as you can, so you need to do it with everything.” That was in October of 2023.

And in September of 2024, our architect Rob Scheer called me up and he said, “you need to set an alarm for the first day of fall at noon.” And I said, “Well, why? That sounds weird, but I will.” And he said, “well, if we put the house in the right spot, the shadow line, because I just put in the solar movement in the CAD, if we put in the exact right spot at noon, there should be a shadow line where the window wall meets the stone cap on the second floor.”

And so I was like, “all right, so I'll do that.” And I was out here and I was sealing wood, so I was up on a ladder kind of looking down on that spot of the house. And it was like quarter to twelve and I'm sitting there watching it going, “there's no way, there's no way.” And it hit exactly right there.

GILGER: Oh my gosh. 

SARAH DYKSTRA: And it was just like chills, call mom, tell her to come down here. Maybe a tear.

GILGER: I was gonna say, did you have a tear or goosebumps there, my goodness.

SARAH DYKSTRA: Yeah, all of them.

GILGER: So I mean you're sitting in the finished version of this house, right? I wonder, what were your takeaways from this? The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation will say, you know, any unbuilt home linked to rights that was not directly built under his eye is not a Frank Lloyd Wright work. It's derivative, that kind of thing. Do you feel like you've really fulfilled this? 

DEBBIE DYKSTRA: Yes, and I invite anybody from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to come visit us and tell us where it is not or how it is not.

SARAH DYKSTRA: We actually had one of the trustees here during the project, Mr. Bing Hu. And he absolutely loves this house, and his favorite house is actually the Penfield House, so he was really excited to come out and and see this one.

I think it's an important part of his legacy too, you know, there were plenty of houses that were built after Frank died. He never came to the Penfield House while it was being constructed. So there's policies and then there's opinions.