Is This a “Real” Frank Lloyd Wright House?

"Welcome to fantasy island!" crows George Smart, CEO of the preservation group USModernist. He’s standing on one of the outdoor terraces of a waterfront house built on an 11-acre private island on New York’s Lake Mahopac, greeting me and a group of architecture enthusiasts who have just arrived by boat to tour the place. It’s a striking structure, with a long cantilever that stretches over a rocky shore and gently lapping waves. As we ascend the two dozen red-painted stairs from the dock to the front patio, we meet Smart and Joe Massaro, the house’s owner, who are enveloped in a plume of smoke from the fireplaces Massaro just lit inside and on the balcony. "Good old Frank Lloyd Wright," Massaro says, wiping soot from his face and hands as he begins the tour. "Do you want to start with the smoke or the leaks?"

The house, located on Petra Island, is one of the most ambitious, unusual, and architecturally controversial buildings in the region. Wright sketched plans for it in 1949 after his client, Ahmed Chahroudi, asked for a masterpiece. Chahroudi wasn’t able to afford the design and deferred construction, but then commissioned a 1,200-square-foot guest cottage, which Wright completed in 1953. The drawing for the cantilevered main house then became part of the architect’s list of hundreds of unbuilt projects. Fast forward to the 2000s when Massaro, who purchased the island in the 1990s, discovered drawings for the 5,000-square-foot, three-bedroom house and decided to complete it.

If Smart’s greeting is a reference to the 1970s television show about an island where secret dreams come true, then Massaro is like Mr. Roarke, the main character who fulfilled the fantasies. For certain fans of Frank Lloyd Wright—those who have visited as many of the architect’s projects as they can, like Smart—being able to step inside just one more of his buildings, especially one in such a dramatic setting, is like hitting the jackpot. "This is an astonishing achievement, it really is," Smart would later tell our group. "It takes a lot of courage and perseverance to be able to put together a project like this."

However, not all historians share this perspective. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, an organization tasked with preserving the architect’s legacy and the heir to all of his intellectual property, does not consider the house Massaro built as a true Wright work. (It does, however, recognize the guesthouse.) In fact, Massaro was embroiled in a copyright lawsuit with the Foundation over this point in the 2000s. As a result of the suit’s settlement, Massaro is required to describe it as "Wright-inspired." Not that he believes it. "It’s a Frank Lloyd Wright house," he tells me on the tour. "I can only say that it’s ‘inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.’ And I tell everybody, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright inspired me to build this masterpiece,’ and that’s what I did." The authorship questions over the Massaro house illuminate broader challenges over posthumously completed buildings by famous architects. Who gets to decide attribution? And should these projects even be completed?

Massaro, a 79-year-old retired sheet metal entrepreneur, is exceedingly proud of his home. "You walk in this door, you know it’s Frank Lloyd Wright," he says. To enter, I step down into a narrow porch and pass through a glass front door and arrive in an expansive receiving room illuminated by triangular skylights. ("There’s twenty six skylights here; twenty six chances to leak," Massaro quips.) From there, I walk straight ahead to reach the dramatic cantilevered living room, where Massaro has set up a video explaining the house’s backstory with holograms of himself and Wright as narrators. The house is split-level; to the left of the entry and up a few steps is the kitchen, dining area, bathroom (which features a giant rock in the shower), and bedrooms. The floors are painted a deep terra-cotta red and the ceilings are warm, varnished wood.

The house feels somewhat Wrightian, thanks to the materials, the relationship to the site, the hearths, and the classic compression and expansion. However, certain elements seem off—LED string lights visible in the crevices of the skylights, which are domed in shape, and, especially, the fieldstone affixed to the walls. Because of building codes and structural requirements, Massaro couldn’t use stone masonry; instead he chose reinforced concrete and then attached rocks to the surface.

Massaro and his architect, Thomas Heinz, an author of over a dozen books on Wright, had to fill in many blanks in order to build the house. "I had a detailed architecture plan but no specifications on the interior," Massaro says of the drawings they worked from, which detailed the floor plan, sections, and elevations. "I could tell from working on a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright houses over the years what it was going to be like inside," says Heinz, who had previously constructed homes from plans Wright drew during a time when the Foundation was more open with its archive.

They also looked to other Wright houses to inform their decisions. "We flew all over the country looking at houses and getting details because the interior details were never completed," Massaro says. A painting behind a built-in banquette in the living room was inspired by one he saw in Blauvelt, New York. He got window details from a visit to the Reisley House in Usonia and riffed on fixtures he saw in another Wright house—he says he can’t remember which—for a series of multicolored lights on an interior half wall. "I couldn’t buy them, so I built them," Massaro says. He and his wife, Barbara, designed hexagonal rugs to match the dimensions of the triangular grid on the floor and had them custom-made in India.

Massaro—who is the type to not let anything get in his way; he self-published a 2021 autobiography titled The Impossible Road—is exceedingly proud of this work. "All I know is, would Frank Lloyd Wright want this house built? Of course he would," he says. "When he walks through that door, would he be happy? That was my goal. And I believe he would be." Massaro’s family is proud of his work, too. "He just does all these wild things," his daughter, Donna, told me about the building endeavor. "Our whole entire life, he’s just done some crazy fun things. So it was just an awe moment. I mean, everybody around town, the whole lake committee, everybody was just in awe about it."

Initially, Massaro wanted to work with the Wright Foundation on the design but due to a dispute over the terms of collaboration, the relationship soured. The Foundation once had a program, which ended in 2006, that provided blueprints and construction supervision for a fee to people who were interested in building Wright’s designs. According to Massaro, the Foundation charged 15 percent of the building costs to supervise the project, which would have normally amounted to $150,000 for a house like this; however, the added challenge of building on an island meant higher construction fees and so 15 percent amounted to $450,000—too high of a sum to him.

So he pushed back on the figure. "Then they told me I couldn’t build the house because they own the copyright," Massaro says. "So that’s when I ended up taking them to court." He believed that because he owned the island and the plans for the house sketched for the island’s original owner, he should own the copyright. They eventually settled the case. In 2007, Philip Allsopp, then the CEO of the Wright Foundation, told New York, "It’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright house, because it hasn’t been certified by the foundation." (The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation declined to talk to me about the house directly.)

This is where the story gets tricky, and where the business of copyright—which is a revenue stream for the Foundation and has resulted in licensed sneakers, rugs, mailboxes, LEGO kits, furniture collections, and more—comes up against what some historians believe would be Wright’s wishes.

"Frank Lloyd Wright himself was very protective, more than most other architects," says Aaron Betsky, an architecture critic and a former curator of architecture and design at SFMOMA. Betsky points out that toward the end of his career, Wright began branding his buildings with red ceramic squares bearing his signature. These tiles were meant to be placed on buildings that "adhered to his specifications and thus received his personal approval," according to an account found in the architect’s archive. There were cases where he wouldn’t allow his tile to be placed "where he fought with clients and they changed things without his consent," Betsky says.

However, preserving an architect’s legacy is expensive and intellectual property is a lucrative business, especially with a famous name attached. In 1983, the Foundation sold 100 Wright drawings in order to pay for sorely needed repairs at Taliesin. It was a break from a traditional practice of donating drawings to museums or libraries so that their work is accessible to researchers and coincided with a time when private collectors began to focus their attention on architecture. The Foundation’s financial problems continued and entered into licensing agreements through the 1990s to provide revenue streams. Legal problems followed over royalties and fees that included lawsuits between the Foundation and manufacturers like Cassina and Copeland, who were making replicas, as well as with the entities that served as licensing agents.

In the 2000s, Allsopp explains, there was a reining in on how Wright’s work was shared. He doesn’t recall the specifics, but says that right before his tenure began in 2006, intellectual property practices became much more formal than they once were, meaning that fans of Wright couldn’t just call up the archivist and pay a fee for drawings because they wanted to live in one of his houses. "That was not a good way to protect any intellectual property or copyright," Allsopp says. "It would be the same with licensed professionals who are practicing architects or engineers. Their work is their copyright. That’s it. And so that’s really what that was about."

Leadership at the Foundation has continued to take a vigilant approach to the use of Wright’s name. In 2019, it sued an Orinda, California, owner of a Usonian home, who rents his place for weddings, for trademark infringement over how he represented his house online; he was ordered to pay $66,000 in damages and changed the domain from his property from franklloydwrightestate.com to thebuehlerestate.com, after the original owners who commissioned the house. In 2020, when Betsky was the dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, the Foundation tried to close the institution. The CEO at the time "said we couldn’t use that name because, heaven forfend, students would do something that he did not consider Frank Lloyd Wright-ish and thereby would taint the name," Betsky says. "So we had to get rid of the name and the compromise that it was the School of Architecture at Taliesin."

Betsky is what you would call a purist, one who believes that you can only call something a Frank Lloyd Wright design if the building was completed in his lifetime and received his approval. "You can’t call it a Frank Lloyd Wright design any longer if you modify it," he says. The Foundation shares this perspective, too. "We don’t support building [from the archive] because Wright was intimately involved in the building of the residents that he designed," says Fred Prozzillo, a Taliesin-trained architect and vice president of preservation and collections at the Foundation. "Back in those days, drawing sets that the architects developed were not as detailed as what designers and architects do today. A lot of the design and the fine details were worked out in the field."

Additionally, modern building codes have requirements for door widths and ceiling heights that would not permit the dimensions and proportions Wright liked. "We can’t do some of the things that he did in the past," Prozzillo says. "That’s a big reason why we don’t allow drawings to be built today and be called Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. They are now just ‘inspired by’ the original drawings."

In 2018, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) issued a position statement on constructing unbuilt designs and lost buildings. It recommended avoiding replicas and reconstructions that create "a false sense of history." The Wright Foundation’s current policy on unbuilt projects aligns with SAH’s.

Heinz thinks most architects, Wright included, want to realize their ideas. "That’s what they’re in business to do," he says, adding that "it must have been so devastating to Frank Lloyd Wright" to have so many unbuilt projects. He also believes architects would be willing to compromise certain details in order to complete a structure. "He was very flexible with his clients," Heinz says of Wright—a statement that doesn’t square with the architect’s public persona as an unflinching artistic genius. (After all, Wright once said, "Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.")

Of course, Heinz also has a financial stake in this: Throughout his career, he has helped multiple people build homes from Wright drawings. (He also had a business producing furniture from Wright drawings that landed him in an intellectual property lawsuit with the Foundation in the 1990s.) "They were money grubbing at the time," Heinz says of the Petra Island attribution dispute. "It was terrible, terrible what they were trying to do to Joe and other people, too. They needed a lot of money, so they were trying to soak these people for huge sums."

Speaking of money: Massaro has been trying to sell his house and island for over a decade, first listing it for $20 million in 2012. He didn’t get any bites, so dropped the price to $14.9 million in 2017 and $10 million in 2019 before taking it off the market. Three years ago, the Massaro family opened the house to public tours. A ticket costs $150. Visits have increased each year: 500 the first, 750 the second, and in 2025, they welcomed 1,000 people. Massaro is hoping for 2,000 this year. "The house is not for sale, but somebody can buy it," he says. "That’s the bottom line. And now it becomes more valuable because it has a business attached to it." The May press visit I attended was part of the strategy around spreading public awareness about the property.

The issues surrounding the correct way to attribute the Petra Island main house illuminates a tension in architectural preservation. Wright was both an artist and a service provider and preserving his legacy can take many forms. (A nonprofit grassroots organization called the Frank Lloyd Building Conservancy formed in the 1980s to focus specifically on maintaining extant works.) For his part, Prozzillo says he welcomes the construction of more homes inspired by Wright, based on how the architect was also a teacher. "He didn’t want to see the apprentices who worked under him just copy his forms—he wanted them to understand his philosophy, his ideas around building, to do something based on the principles," he says. "It’s understanding the ideas and using those in contemporary ways." An important caveat? It’s not about "making it look like a Frank Lloyd Wright," he adds.

The contrast of a house that "looks like Wright" and a Wright design is perhaps best illustrated on Petra Island. The Massaros also opened the guesthouse to visitors on my trip. There was a level of intimacy and cohesion to the space that reminded me of my visits to other Wright houses through the years. I was particularly struck by the material detailing, especially the desert masonry walls, with real stone embedded into the concrete versus affixed to the surface like a rock climbing wall. I imagine Wright, who preached truth to materials, would certainly have a strong opinion about this, too.

Still, the Massaro house has breathtaking moments—especially within the cantilever. It’s like being in a ship, both completely immersed in the natural surroundings yet protected from it. From that vantage point, some of the less than faithful details fade into the background and you’re left with one of Wright’s core ideas, a building that emerges from its site and couldn’t exist anywhere else.

Editor’s Note: George Smart’s USModernist website hosts scans of back issues of Dwell that appear in our From the Archive series.

Correction 6/4/26: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the name of Joe Massaro’s wife. It also inaccurately identified Aaron Betsky’s former employer.

Top photo courtesy Petra Island Tours / Wright Over Water

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