Over the course of a seven-decade career and up until his death in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright was remarkably prolific. He designed more than 1,100 structures, from museums, office towers, hotels, and churches to houses of all sizes and configurations. Not all were realized, but some served as templates for later designs in which the architect refined and adapted themes that sparked his seemingly limitless curiosity.

One such project was a 1958 guest house that Wright planned for his friends and clients Don and Virginia Lovness in Stillwater, Minnesota. With its triangulated roof and sharply angled overhang projecting out from one side—Wright had a facility for acute geometries—the drawings for the Lovnesses’ Cottage C were nearly identical to the unbuilt summer home he’d designed a decade before at Taliesin for his youngest sister, Maginel Wright Barney.

Like his 1948 plan for Maginel, the Minnesota home also demonstrated Wright’s penchant for exploring new ideas, says architect Tim Quigley, the coauthor of a monograph on the architectural career of Wright’s chief draftsman, John Howe, and a board member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

“Why was Wright playing with extreme geometries in 1948? He was always restless from a design standpoint,” Quigley says. “He tried to get everything he ever designed built, and time and again, he designed many a house type that became the basis of subsequent, related designs.”

Maginel’s summer retreat and Cottage C might have existed only on paper, but after Don’s death, Virginia gifted working drawings to a longtime friend, done by Taliesin Associated Architects, a firm founded by Wright apprentices. And that friend had just the spot for it: a lakeside site he co-owned in Marine on St. Croix, northeast of Minneapolis. Working with architect David Uppgren, in 2006, the owners realized the single-story design, but expanded it to include a lower level that opens out to the lake. Virginia’s friend now lives there full-time.

Called Bear Run, the home’s name is a nod to both the nature reserve surrounding Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater, and the owners’ collective succession of white English golden retrievers—all given ursine names like Grizzly, Panda, and Kodiak. After several years, the owners began thinking about building an “age-in-place” companion to the original residence on a neighboring property where the other of the two could live, and reached out to Jeremy and Sara Imhoff, founders and principals of Imprint Architecture + Design, to collaborate.

Jeremy and Sara considered the site, the friendship between the two owners, and the undeniable impact of Wright’s original design and asked themselves three questions: How to show respect to Wright’s design without duplicating it? How to create a design alongside Bear Run that would stand the test of time? How to imbue the house with a modern, timeless sophistication within their clients’ budget?

The result is an 1,818-square-foot house the owners call Kyodai, Japanese for “brothers.” It complements the dramatic geometries of Bear Run while also honoring Wright’s longstanding appreciation for Japan and his style of organic architecture, which is distinct in how it harmonizes with a setting. The houses, says Sara, are “brothers—different yet the same.”

Explains Jeremy: “We were really conscious about the relationship between the two homes and how they would feed off each other. Bear Run’s very unique roof—an asymmetrical tetrahedron—was a major focus of our design. For Kyodai, we created a very simple hipped roof that comes down to a knifepoint at the edge” much like Bear Run’s.

“We also studied the roof overhangs,” says Sara. “Frank Lloyd Wright had these beautiful, cantilevered, Prairie-style roof overhangs, so we looked at how we could play with that. We didn’t want to compete with that tetrahedron roof, but to complement it.”

The roofline of the Wright design inspired Kyodai’s Y-shaped plan, whose three wings “essentially turn Bear Run’s three-sided roof plan inside out,” adds Sara. The plan also yields views of and access to three outdoor spaces: an entrance court, a rear garden that serves as a connection between the two homes, and a terrace and seating area that faces the lake.

Instead of replicating Bear Run’s extensive use of limestone, Sara and Jeremy chose concrete masonry units, cut into four-by-twenty-four-inch blocks and laid in a combination of smooth and split faces for a variegated texture and to emphasize the home’s horizontal lines.

“There are a lot of natural materials in this house,” Sara explains. “And that’s what we were striving for—a balance of a natural grounding stone or concrete with wood.”

In his autobiography, Wright wrote that “no house should ever be on a hill… it should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.” Side by side, Kyodai and Bear Run sit high above the lake shore nestled into Marine on St. Croix’s sloping landscape, perhaps just as Wright would have imagined.

More Frank Lloyd Wright:

The Ultimate Guide to Frank Lloyd Wright

What You Need to Know About Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Homes

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel Was a Trial by Fire, But It Sparked His Most Famous Homes

Project Credits:

Bear Run:

Architect of Record: David Uppgren of Uppgren + Associates, Inc.

Builder: David Wallin, Anderson Wallin Construction

Kyodai House:

Architecture and Interior Design: Sara and Jeremy Imhoff of Imprint Architecture / @imprint.architecture

Contractor: Hagstrom Builder / @hagstrombuilder

Structural Engineer: Kyle Bruender, PE, Mortarless System Engineering

Landscape Design: Landscape Love / @landscapelovempls

Landscape Installation: Landscape Renovations / @landscaperenovationsmn

Concrete Design: Living Stone Concrete Design / @living_stone_concrete_design

Woodwork: Great Lakes Wood Co. / @greatlakeswoodco

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