3 Years and Over $2 Million: What It Costs to Restore a Frank Lloyd Wright Home

Sixty five years after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright has sustained quite the fan club. His admirers congregate in Facebook Groups, like the 120,000-member Frank Lloyd Wright Nation, to share photos of his structures and discuss his brilliance on the daily. Roughly 150,000 people visit his most widely known home, Fallingwater, each year. And for many Wright superfans, living in one of the roughly 400 remaining homes designed by the famed 20th-century architect is the ultimate dream.

Still, Wright’s structures are notorious for aging poorly. Weak foundations, leaky roofs, and poor insulation, among other problems, have reportedly caused headaches for homeowners again and again over the decades. Given the high highs and low lows of his homes, we wondered what it would cost to make one of them from scratch in 2024, with slight adjustments to avoid these common problems. Dwell reached out to a range of contractors across the states with the most Wright-designed residences—namely Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, California, and Arizona—to suss it out, but most were hesitant to make an estimate of what such a project might cost, stating either that they’d need much more than the available photos and blueprints, or they didn’t have the bandwidth to turn around estimates. So instead we sought out the next best thing: Frank Lloyd Wright homeowners and curators who would share what their restoration processes entailed.

Still Bend was suffering from deferred maintenance when brothers Michael and Gary Ditmer purchased the Two Rivers, Wisconsin, residence (also known as Schwartz House) in 2003. "We bought the house knowing that we were probably gonna have to put in almost what we paid for it within the first year just to stabilize it," Michael says. The Ditmers’ assumption was correct—they spent close to $300,000 on restoring the 2,900-square-foot Usonian-style home in the first year of the project. Work included replacing the roof, removing siding on the exterior that was covering the original exterior wood on part of the house, repairing a utility room wall that was deflecting, restoring the brickwork around the perimeter of the house, repairing the chimney, and rebuilding a balcony that had suffered a carpenter ant infestation, among other tweaks.

As stewards of the home, which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2019, and is now open to the public for tours and as an overnight rental, the Ditmers’ aim with Still Bend is to give visitors an experience as similar as possible to that of the original owners. In keeping with that, their work has been focused on maintaining the home as it was designed in 1938—not extensively updating it for modern life. "I’ve seen some [Wright] houses where people think they need to modernize the kitchen or the bathrooms and there’s a certain tipping point where if you start changing too many things the magic disappears," Michael says.

When Marika Broere and Tony Hillebrandt purchased the 1953 Eppstein House as a vacation property in 2016, it was in desperate need of saving. Motivated by their passion for architecture, the couple decided to spend their retirement nest egg on restoring the Galesburg, Michigan, home. Cement blocks are an essential element of many of Wright’s Usonian structures, though they’ve proven to be hard to maintain over the decades. After a lengthy search for craftspeople who could handle the cement work, Marika says repairing and preserving the blocks alone cost $150,000, in addition to replacing the roof (which cost between $50,000 and $70,000) and "invisible improvements" spent on heating and electric ($100,000) and plumbing ($40,000).

The couple’s intention was to rent the Eppstein House on Airbnb a couple of nights a month, but the demand was much higher than expected. In 2018, that rental income allowed them to buy the Wright–designed home next door: the Pratt House. Built in 1951, the Pratt House was actually in much better shape than the Eppstein House, but still, it required tens of thousands of dollars to bring back to life. Revitalizing the wood was one of the focuses of the restoration, along with replacing the structure’s roof. "The exterior mahogany was sanded down and varnished and the interior wood was lightly sanded with steel wool and oiled," says Marika. Though the couple did most of the work on restoring the wood themselves, they spent over $70,000 on it alone.

When Eliot Butler bought the Usonian-style Pew House in Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin, in 2009, the windows and doors were most in need of attention. Over time, the eaves on the home’s second floor had drooped, making the windows and doors impossible to open. Butler was able to straighten out the eaves and repair the openings rather than replacing them entirely—a process that cost roughly $25,000 when it was completed that year. 

As with many historic home restorations, an element of Butler’s restoration work was in erasing a change made by previous owners. The Pew House’s prior residents had painted the floors and walls of the terraces in a gray marine paint and Butler knew that the paint should be removed to reveal the original wood facade and floors. The time-consuming process, which included replacing some rotten boards and restoring others, cost $40,000.

"We want our home and its surroundings to have a future, one that will grow with us," wrote Kay Christian to Wright in the early ’50s, describing her hopes for the house that she and her husband, John Christian, were commissioning from him, called Samara. The Indiana home—completed in the mid-’50s, just a few years before Wright’s death—is now deeded to the John E. Christian Family Memorial and co-stewarded by Indiana Landmarks. Curator Nathaniel C. Allaire is one of the individuals responsible for ensuring the future Kay wrote about. Planning for Samara’s restoration began in 2019, with work starting in the spring of 2022 and wrapping up that December, shepherded by curator Linda Eales at that time. 

The wide-ranging restoration project cost over $2 million in all—with $125,800 spent on windows and French doors, $20,800 on restoring the wood cutouts in the clerestories, and tens of thousands of dollars going toward heating and cooling. Most of the project’s budget was devoted to structural work, but interior details needed maintenance too. For instance, after holding "a lifetime worth of tchotchkes and books," Allaire says the living room’s 30-foot-long bookshelf needed to be refinished and reinforced with metal brackets. This part of the restoration cost $3,800.

"With every Frank Lloyd Wright home, I think we all have the same goal, but how we achieve the goal can vary from site to site, in terms of management and funding," Allaire says. Indeed, costs can vary widely depending on individual owners’ plans for what purpose the house will serve, the level of meticulousness, and the idiosyncrasies of each specific structure. 

"Too often it happens, unfortunately, that people buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house out of passion," says Broere, "not aware of how much the restoration will cost them in money, time, and perseverance."

Top photo of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pratt House by Brian Powers

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