Wall Street Journal Crystal Springs
Featuring the Frank Lloyd Wright-Inspired Imagine Series
Mark Lloyd’s house near Asheville, N.C., is based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House, but it has bigger rooms and higher ceilings and substitutes red-painted cement board for mahogany siding and beige-painted cement board for cinder block. MELODY ROBBINS PHOTOGRAPHY/LINDAL CEDAR HOMES
As a young married man with four children and a demanding job, Mark Lloyd thought about building a new house for his family. But, given how busy he was back then, the process, he says, was “just too complicated.” Then the kids grew up and his marriage ended, and he realized that—as a computer engineer with the ability to telecommute—he could live in his dream location (the Blue Ridge Mountains) and in his dream house, which he knew would somehow channel Frank Lloyd Wright.
Lloyd, 60, had been fascinated with Wright since childhood, and he especially liked Wright’s modest Usonian houses, which feature open floor plans, walls of glass and flat roofs with extensive overhangs. But a real Wright house wouldn’t have satisfied Lloyd.
Wright (who died in 1959) rarely made space for TV sets, much less the 85-inch screen that lets Lloyd watch while sitting near his fireplace some 20 feet away. Wright’s rooms were often tiny and had ceilings as low as 7 ½ feet. And Lloyd, a self-described techie, wanted other features that were unknown in Wright’s day, like a smart-home system.
Lloyd and his sister shopped for furniture—some new, some vintage—in Asheville and Charlotte. Only one item in this part of the living room was designed by Wright: the totem-like lamp to the left of the 85-inch TV.
So in 2019 he began searching for an architect who would design him a “21st-century Frank Lloyd Wright house.” “They all looked at me like I was crazy,” he says. Then, while googling, he learned that Lindal Cedar Homes had just begun selling kits for houses based on Frank Lloyd Wright designs. “It was exactly what I wanted, tied up with a bow,” he says.
Lindal, established in Canada in 1944 and now based in Seattle, sells kits that allow houses to be built quickly and with minimal waste. Most of its models are rustic-looking, with the titular wood siding, but their post-and-beam construction (picture a grid of large horizontal and vertical supports) makes room for expansive windows.
With some of the house’s six french doors left open, Chad, Lloyd’s American Staffordshire Terrier, moves freely between indoors and outdoors, as do Lloyd’s three grandchildren when they visit.
PHOTO: CHARLOTTE LLOYD & RACHEL LLOYD
The company’s Wright-inspired houses were designed by Aris Georges, a 59-year-old Wisconsin architect who studied at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and taught there for decades. Working with Trina Lindal, a scion of the home-building family (and also a graduate of the Wright school), Georges eventually developed nine Lindal houses based on Wright’s designs. Ceilings were raised to 9 ½ feet or more, and whenever possible the 4-foot grid favored by Wright was enlarged to 5 ½ feet (nearly doubling the size of some spaces). The houses are authorized by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. “But we make clear that these are not Wright houses,” says Stuart Graff, president of the Arizona-based organization. “They’re houses inspired by Wright.”
Lloyd studied the Lindal models on his laptop and settled on its version of the Bachman-Wilson house, which was built in New Jersey in 1956 and is now on permanent display at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Lloyd liked the fact that it had a second floor with cantilevered decks—rare for a Usonian house. But the kitchen in the Bachman-Wilson house is a small galley. For Lindal’s version, Georges greatly enlarged the kitchen. Lloyd wanted to make it even larger, to accommodate gatherings of his extended family, which includes his seven siblings and their clans. His kitchen is 21 feet by 10 feet. Georges likes it so much he says he plans to use what he calls “the Lloyd kitchen” on future projects. Overall, Lloyd’s house contains 2,800 square feet—compared with the 1,670 square feet of Bachman-Wilson.
In the breakfast area Lloyd hung a wooden plaque based on a Wright design for art glass windows at his Dana-Thomas House in Illinois.
The Bachman-Wilson House was moved from New Jersey to the grounds of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Like many Wright houses, it has a built-in sofa and matching ottomans. Louvers over the glass doors control the amount of light entering the room.
CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART (2)
Working with Georges on changes to the house, “I was a young Padawan,” Lloyd says, using a term from “Star Wars” for a person eager to learn. There was a lot of compromising. Lloyd wanted to paint the street side of the house white, mimicking the Bachman-Wilson House, but Georges persuaded him that Wright preferred the slightly darker color of the balconies at Fallingwater. The white on Bachman-Wilson, Georges says, might have been a post-Wright modification. They compromised on a beige—Savannah Wicker from Sherwin Williams—which Lindal painted onto concrete boards in its factory. Other concrete boards, replacing the mahogany siding on Bachman-Wilson, were painted a version of the Cherokee red used extensively by Wright. The other interior and exterior finishes were also chosen during consultations with Georges. “We tried to keep it as authentic as possible,” Lloyd says.
“It is definitely a Lindal home,” Georges says, “but it could not have existed without Wright’s Bachman-Wilson house. It’s like a remix or a cover.” Georges says that “when Lindal began this project, I was in a tough spot personally. Frank Lloyd Wright was my superhero,” and before tampering with the master’s houses “I had to do a lot of soul-searching.” But, Georges concluded, “Wright had some beautiful ideas that can still work today. My job is to make sure the spirit of the original house remains.”
The mountain road leading to the home site (see yellow circle) was too steep for the semi-trucks carrying pieces of Lloyd’s house. The cargo was transferred onto smaller trucked to be transported up the hill.
RACHELL LLOYD AND CHARLOTTE LLOYD (3)
Once Georges signed off on the design, he took it to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation for approval. The foundation receives a small royalty on each sale by Lindal of a house in the series. The company says it has sold 10 of the kits so far and that four of those 10 houses are completed. Lloyd’s kit cost just under $300,000 at the end of 2019. (Prices in 2024 are at least 40% higher, according to Christina Lindal, the company’s president and Trina’s sister.)
While the kit was being manufactured, Lloyd went looking for a lot that would allow him to orient the house the same way Wright had oriented Bachman-Wilson. With the house situated any other way, the size of the windows and the depths of the overhangs on each side would have made no sense. In 2019, he found a parcel for sale at the prow of a hill about 14 miles due west of Asheville, N.C. Its 10 sloping acres—some too steep to be built on—overlooked a verdant meadow, with Mount Mitchell (the highest point on the East Coast of the U.S.) in the distance. Lloyd bought the lot for $275,000. Its elevation—3,450 feet—meant it would be subject to high winds. So Lindal modified the kit, installing “hurricane ties,” or hidden connectors, so pieces wouldn’t blow off.
Two nearly identical upstairs bedrooms have their own balconies, which Lloyd outfitted with teak rockers. With doors and windows left open, Lloyd says, he rarely needs air conditioning.
MELODY ROBBINS PHOTOGRAPHY/LINDAL CEDAR HOMES (2)
Meanwhile, Lloyd had the lot graded. “Basically, I chopped eight or nine feet off the top of this mountain and used that earth to create a large flat lawn. It was a lot of bulldozer work.” The same excavating crew buried a septic tank in the middle of that yard and hand-dug trenches for the septic drain pipes. A different company drilled a well through nearly 1,000 feet of solid granite to bring Lloyd water. The digging and drilling and earth-moving cost about $150,000, Lloyd says.
After COVID-related delays, the kit arrived by train and truck from Washington state in two containers, one in March and one in May 2021. The semis holding the containers couldn’t get up the steep hill to Lloyd’s house, so their contents had to be transferred to smaller flatbed trucks.
The kit contained the house’s post-and-beam structure and its “envelope,” including siding, doors and windows. Almost everything else—the foundation, the roof, the interior walls, plumbing, electric, HVAC (including radiant heating in the concrete floors and a forced air AC system)—was provided by the local builder, whose fee for materials and labor was about $500,000. It would have been more if Lloyd hadn’t taken a year off from work to help out every day.
He did most of the electrical work himself, including wiring the smart-home system, valuing his contribution at $50,000 to $100,000. “It was fulfilling and it was fun,” he says of his participation. By this point, he had spent a total of about $1.25 million, plus sweat equity.
Lindal’s version of the Bachman-Wright House significantly increased the size of the kitchen.
A plan of the original Bachman-Wilson House is displayed under a runner on the dining table.
PHOTO MELODY ROBBINS PHOTOGRAPHY/LINDAL HOMES
Lloyd was going to build a totemic floor lamp based on Wright’s design, but after watching instructions on YouTube he didn’t think he could match the precision of the professionally made version.
Adirondack chairs face east toward the sunrise and Asheville.
Melody Robbins Photography/Lindal Cedar Homes (3)
When it came time to choose furniture, Lloyd relied on two of his sisters. “They studied the Frank Lloyd Wright books with me, shopped endlessly at stores in Asheville and Charlotte, helped me build and rebuild furniture, and even did much of the upholstering,” he says. When he could, he bought pieces licensed by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. That includes a spectacular, totem-like AlaModerna Taliesin 2 Floor Lamp.
Lloyd, who is chief technology director at Issuer Direct Corporation, recently had the house appraised for $1.775 million. But he didn’t build it to make money. The finished house is a joy, says Lloyd. Each morning, after the sun rises behind the Blue Ridge Mountains, one or more colorful hot air balloons rises from the valley. And in warm weather, at least six separate french doors can be left open. Chad, Lloyd’s American Staffordshire terrier, is in and out all day, as are Lloyd’s three grandkids when they visit.
“The downside,” Lloyd says, “is that it’s so open that all the noise travels throughout the house. So the acoustics aren’t great.” But then he recalls his childhood in Iowa. “There were eight kids and the whole house was smaller than my living room.” And suddenly his new house doesn’t seem so noisy.
Appeared in the May 17, 2024, print edition as ‘Build Yourlcing Own Frank Lloyd Wright’.
Links to More Information
Floor plans of the Crystal Springs home, based on Wright’s Bachman Wilson design
The Imagine Series of Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Usonian-style homes
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
The Imagine Series
