Michael Overall: Reintroducing Tulsa to a ‘forgotten’ Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece

While the new owner is fumbling with his keys to unlock the front door, a minivan pulls up to the curb and four or five people climb out, cell phones in hand, ready to start taking pictures.

“Oh, here they come,” Stuart Price says, rushing through the door before the uninvited guests have a chance to ask if they can see inside.

He watches from a window as the people stroll through the yard like it’s a public park.

“Every day,” Price says with a grin. “It happens every day.”

Tourists come from all over the country, maybe all over the world. They don’t necessarily visit Tulsa just for this house, but while they’re here, they make sure to see it.

The funny thing is: There are people who live half a mile away and have never heard of it, Price says.

“It’s pretty ironic, isn’t it?”

The world’s best architect?

Frank Lloyd Wright was suffering through a slump in his career when his cousin, Tulsa Tribune Publisher Richard Lloyd Jones, asked him to design a house for a 4-acre site near 41st Street and Lewis Avenue, the southern outskirts of town in 1928. Jones named the estate Westhope, after his grandmother’s home in England. And he expected the kind of house that had made Wright famous around the world — a low, horizontal design that almost seemed to be part of the natural landscape. “Organic” was Wright’s favorite word to describe his own style.

But Wright’s reputation was beginning to fade as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other avant-garde modernists were seizing international acclaim working with glass, steel and concrete — about as inorganic as building materials could get.

Never mind what his cousin wanted, Wright decided to reclaim his mantle as the world’s most innovative architect. Instead of having a low, horizontal roofline, this design would stack textile blocks into vertical columns interspersed at equal distances with vertical rows of glass, almost making the house look striped. Windows made up nearly half the exterior walls, using 5,200 panes of glass and flooding the interior with natural light during the day. At night, the house radiates with an enormous amount of recessed lighting — 57 bulbs embedded in the walls of the living room alone.

Jones had budgeted $40,000 to build the house. By the time Wright finished construction in 1931, it had cost more than $100,000.

What’s next for Westhope?

Price bought the home in October.

His real-estate company, Price Family Properties, owns some of downtown Tulsa’s most historic landmarks, including the Philcade building and First Place Tower. And he has gained a reputation for balancing historic preservation with modern updates.

Now he’s bringing the same expertise to Westhope.

“We’re incredibly lucky to be stewards of this masterpiece,” Price says.

The first change he made, on the very day the sale became final, was cutting down a large tree that was threatening to topple onto the roof. Then craftsmen went mortar joint by mortar joint to make the house waterproof again.

The windows, cloudy with age, are being cleaned and broken panes replaced with new glass that is indistinguishable from the old. Walls are being repainted in the original colors. And cracked blocks are being seamlessly patched.

“It’s a solid house, built to last hundreds of years,” Price says. “The previous owners took good care of it. Let’s just say it needs some TLC.”

A New York architecture firm that was once led by I.M. Pei, one of the most celebrated modernists of the late 20th century, will design an expansion for the master suite. And Price is planning to fill the house with “appropriate furniture.”

Then what?

“I don’t know,” he says.

He could live in it. He could re-sell it.

Or?

“I don’t know what the final story of this house will be,” Price says, adding the he is “having discussions with thought partners” about the best ways to use the property.

“It would be incredible if this house could serve as a cultural and community asset for Tulsa,” he says. “What does that mean? I’m not sure yet. But right now, I want to reintroduce Tulsa to Westhope.”

Form or function?

There’s an old story about a governor of Oklahoma, while visiting the famous Price Tower in Bartlesville, ending up on the floor after trying to sit down in a Wright-designed chair in the executive offices. In fact, a lot of people are said to have fallen out of Wright’s chairs.

“They weren’t designed for comfort,” says Jeffrey Tanenhaus of Tulsa Tours. “They weren’t really designed for people to fit in them.”

For Wright, function followed form, not the other way around. At Westhope, for example, many of the windows swing outward, which conformed to Wright’s philosophy of blurring the distinction between indoors and the outdoors, Tenenhaus says. But it also meant fresh air would be accompanied by flies and mosquitoes.

“He wasn’t going to let either the client’s preferences or the cost hold him back from designing what he thought was best,” Tenenhaus says.

Other than Westhope, Wright designed only two buildings in Oklahoma, both finished in the 1950s in Bartlesville: the Harold Price Jr. House and the 19-story Price Tower — no relation to Stuart Price.

Of the three, the skyscraper is obviously the biggest and best-known. But Westhope might have been the most significant to Wright’s career, Tenenhaus says.

“It seems to have been a transitional house for him because it doesn’t fit neatly into any of the styles traditionally associated with him,” he says. “It’s unique, and it lets you see how Wright’s ideas were evolving.”

Tenenhaus will offer tours of the house during some upcoming events at Westhope.

The Tulsa Ballet will host a fundraising dinner there May 24, where the guests will include Richard Lloyd Jones’ granddaughter. And the Tulsa Foundation for Architecture will have a invitation-only reception at the house May 25.

Neither event will be open to the public. But to celebrate Westhope’s ongoing renovation, a renowned Frank Lloyd Wright expert will offer a two-part lecture series May 26 at the Tulsa Historical Society.

Timothy Totten has given talks around the world to audiences who have an insatiable curiosity about Wright’s architecture and his colorful, sometimes scandalous life.

Together, the three events will bring more attention to Westhope than it has had in decades.

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