2203 River Rd., Willoughby Hills, Ohio. County/parish: Lake.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places February 07, 1997. NRIS 96001622.
1 contributing building.
The Louis Penfield House is a house at 2203 River Road in Willoughby Hills, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, United States. One of nine Usonian homes in Ohio designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Penfield House was built for the art teacher Louis Penfield. The two-story house is made of wood panels and concrete blocks, with large glass windows on the exterior. Inside are an open-air carport, a combined living–dining–kitchen area on the first floor, and three bedrooms above the kitchen. Since Penfield wanted the house to accommodate his 6-foot-8-inch (203 cm) stature, the house has higher doorways than many other buildings designed by Wright. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Louis Penfield commissioned the house in 1952, and it was completed in 1955. Penfield also commissioned Wright to design a second house on the site, known as RiverRock, which was postponed due to a lack of funds. The family moved out in the 1990s and maintained it as a rental property for five years. Starting in 1998, Louis's son Paul restored the Penfield House for $100,000. Paul started renting the house out to guests in 2003 and placed it for sale in 2014. The Dykstra family bought the house in 2018 and decided to construct RiverRock, which was finished in 2025.
(read more...)National Park Service documentation: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/71989567