When you request to book a stay in Gary and Sue Cox’s short-term rental property in Ann Arbor, Michigan, you must first fill out a brief intake form stating your name, address, the number of overnight guests in your party and how you intend to use the 2,000-square-foot house, which sits on two wooded acres adjacent to the University of Michigan arboretum.
If you’re not planning to throw a wedding, a bachelor party or a family reunion, the Coxes will generally accept your request.
But you’re not in the clear yet.
Next comes a phone call from Sue. She’ll ask a few more questions and give you a comprehensive rundown of the house rules: no fiddling with the thermostat, no fires in the fireplace and no children younger than 6 — the house is too treacherous for little ones. “It’s concrete and brick and wood and sharp, sharp angles,” she says.
Weekends during football season require extra vetting, according to Sue — two, maybe even three calls. “I don’t want six guys from the visiting team with a keg of beer and a dog. That’s my nightmare.”
Sue, 78, and Gary, 81, aren’t just finicky landlords — they’re fastidious stewards of an architectural gem. Multiple times a week, they hand over the keys to the William and Mary Palmer House, designed in the late 1940s by Frank Lloyd Wright, the legendary architect and pioneer of “organic architecture,” the idea that homes and buildings should exist in harmony with the natural environment. Built of cypress and brick, the three-bedroom home features an equilateral triangle motif, with hexagonal beds and interior walls that meet at 60 and 120 degrees.
There are about 400 Wright-designed homes still standing in the United States, and 74 of them are open to the public for guided tours. There are only about a dozen you can rent for the full experience. The owners of these homes are driven by a desire to share a piece of architectural heritage while also protecting a historic landmark — not to mention their own budgets. It’s a delicate balance.
“You’ve got an icon that you need to preserve but you’re trying to run a business,” Sue says. “There are years that we don’t make a profit because we hit that decline button an awful lot.”
The Coxes never intended to own a Wright home, let alone rent one out. But their son, Josh Schox, a lawyer in San Francisco, became enamored of the Palmer House while out on runs during his years at the University of Michigan. When the 1952 property went on the market in 2008, Schox and his wife, Kate, scooped it up for $900,000 — but not to live in. Schox had a vision, Sue says, “to give people the opportunity not to just go through a house and stay behind the velvet rope and end up in the gift shop, but to experience it.” His parents, approaching retirement and living in nearby Plymouth, Michigan, would be its custodians.
The original owners had taken such meticulous care of the house that there was almost no work needed before the Coxes posted it on short-term rental sites. In the summer of 2009, when the first guests arrived, “I felt like I had dropped the baby off at the day care center,” Sue says. “And I just had to trust the people that took it.”
Michael Ditmer, 65, was a self-described Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiast when he purchased the Bernard and Fern Schwartz House, also known as Still Bend, in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The home is based on a design that Wright completed for a Life magazine feature called “Dream House,” for which the architect was asked to design the perfect home for a family of moderate income.
In 2003, when Still Bend hit the market, Ditmer couldn’t afford to buy it outright. So he and his brother, Gary, hatched a plan to fund the purchase and upkeep by renting it out to other Wright enthusiasts. But first they had to repair a sunken fireplace, replace the roof and remove the siding that covered the 3,000-square-foot home.
“The first year, we spent more money than we paid for the house just to stabilize it,” Michael Ditmer says.
Ditmer speaks with every guest before confirming their stay, asking innocuous-seeming questions about their interest in the house or familiarity with Wright. “It may not sound like they’re being screened,” he says, “but they’re being screened.”
But from the beginning, Ditmer has been pleasantly surprised by his guests’ thoughtfulness. “People are so reverent to make sure they take good care of it,” he says.
When Thomas Papinchak was growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a visit to nearby Fallingwater — by far Wright’s most famous home — kick-started his lifelong fascination with the architect. He started giving tours of his childhood tree house, which he had built beneath a cantilever roof.
Today Papinchak, 49, owns Polymath Park, a 130-acre resort in the Laurel Highlands region of Pennsylvania that features four rental homes, two designed by Wright apprentice Peter Berndtson (the Blum and Balter houses) as well as two designed by Wright (the Donald C. Duncan House and the R.W. Lindholm, or “Mäntylä” House) that were disassembled and moved from Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, where they were slated for demolition. The homes at the resort, 30 minutes from the Wright masterpiece Fallingwater, offer visitors a more intimate experience — without the tour guide.
“You can always get an hour-long feel of a space,” Papinchak says, “but here you can immerse yourself, really make the house your home for one night, and see how it felt to be a client of Wright’s.”
Papinchak, a home builder and restaurateur who runs Polymath Park with his wife, Heather, is purposeful about giving guests “a really true feel” of what the houses would have been like when they were finished in the 1950s and ’60s, incorporating period furniture, kitchenware and literature. “You’re not walking into an Ikea,” he says. “You’re going back in time.”
But going back in time has its drawbacks, too.
“I tell all the clients you are back in 1952, whether you want to be or not,” says Sue Cox. The Palmer House does not have a TV or a programmable thermostat.
Ditmer warns guests that the bedrooms in Still Bend, which are compact by modern standards, should be thought of more as sleeping rooms.
The properties are also full of expensive and sometimes original items. Guests at Still Bend have scraped the board-and-batten walls, while an errant headphone cord sent an antique lamp crashing to the concrete floor.
A guest at Polymath Park once put his foot through a barrel chair designed by the influential Japanese American designer George Nakashima while standing on it for a photo.
“Beautiful $12,000 chair,” Papinchak says. “But after that, everything felt kind of incidental.”
In addition to the occasional mishap, maintenance is an ongoing challenge for the hosts.
“When you have a plumbing problem, you need a plumber that understands how they used to do it in the old days,” says Gary Cox. The Coxes rely on the sons of the original team of tradespeople who built the house in the 1950s. When the original Thermador stove needed a new burner, a replacement part was no longer available. Now the six-burner stove is a four-burner stove.
Owning a Frank Lloyd Wright rental, Ditmer adds, is certainly not for those looking for an investment property.
“It took many, many years before we were in the black, and we still put money in every year,” he says. “It’s more a labor of love than a transaction in the market.”
Ditmer, though, is sustained by the avalanche of gratitude he receives from his guests, a feeling that goes both ways. “They keep thanking me and thanking me, and I thank them for helping us to restore and maintain the house.”
The guest book at the Duncan House at Polymath Park is filled with grateful messages in a variety of languages; the words “bucket list” and “dream come true” are written on many pages.
“I like to hear the word ‘magical,’” says Papinchak. Guests often mention how the house takes on different moods depending on the time of day. Wright was known for orienting his homes to take advantage of the sun’s light and heat.
“Early in the morning, the light is very crisp, and then the afternoon light is mellow, and you’re ready to relax,” Papinchak says. “And then in the evening, the soft light makes it very romantic, almost spiritual.”
Guests at Ann Arbor’s Palmer House are also captivated by the light. “I check in on people, and they planned to go to the Henry Ford Museum, planned to go here, and go there,” says Gary Cox. “And instead, they say they just sat there for three days and watched the house change with the light.”
The post You can stay overnight in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. But first, a few rules. appeared first on Washington Post.
