THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603150068
SECTION: HOME PAGE: G1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 188 lines
IN 1958, ARCHITECTS from across the state dashed to Virginia Beach, hoping for a peek at some honest-to-goodness Frank Lloyd Wright blueprints.
A Wright-designed home was being built at the North End of the Oceanfront. The state's architects considered this quite a big event. After all, Wright had been a paragon in their field for more than half a century.
Ground was broken on the Beach house on April 7, 1959. Two days later, America's greatest 20th century architect died at age 90.
As it turned out, it was among Wright's last completed works; it was finished in January 1960, one month after Wright's spectacular, spiraling Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Flash forward four decades. On March 2, 300 of the state's architects and design fanciers were lined up for a bus ride to the little-known Wright house at the Beach.
All day long, they went in shifts to the modest-sized house on Crystal Lake. Organized by the Hampton Roads chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the tour sold out 12 days after it was announced, said Patrick Masterson, the group's president.
It is one of three Wright-designed homes in Virginia. The other two are in McLean and Mount Vernon.
Architects just back from a visit bore a look of dazed pleasure. ``It's a real nice house,'' stressed Norfolk architect Gary Bright. ``The scale and all the elements are well done. And the way the house flowed. Everything is so finely detailed.''
His father, Albert Bright, a custom woodworker for 50 years, noticed that the house has ``tons of woodwork in it. The whole interior is practically wood, which is most unusual. Mostly cypress, some cherry, a little bit of walnut.''
Gary's wife, Margaret, praised ``how the house related from the inside out, and the way it related to the landscape.''
She liked how the floor-to-ceiling windows across the main living area were framed - ``so you get little vignettes of the landscape. That way, you're not overwhelmed by one massive view.''
This was the first large public tour ever staged for the house.
The tour's timing was due to another rare factor: For the second time in its history, the house was on the market.
The home was commissioned by Andrew and Maude Kay Cooke in 1951. Though budgeted at $40,000, the project grew and grew, eventually costing the Cookes about $120,000, Masterson said, a figure boosted in part by the high caliber of craftsmanship and materials required for a Wright house. The family lived there from 1960 until two years after the death in 1981 of Andrew, a dentist.
Now the second owners, Dan and Jane Duhl, are ready to sell. The retired couple wants to move to Woodstock, N.Y., where they plan to turn an old home into a bed and breakfast, said Clara Jean ``C.J.'' Howell, the Virginia Beach agent with Prudential Decker Realty who listed the house in July.
When they moved in, the Duhls made repairs - there was termite and water damage - and numerous improvements, such as installing central air conditioning and an outdoor ``swim spa.'' All changes were made with a sensitivity to Wright's design, Dan Duhl said.
The Duhls want $950,000 for the home, Howell said. That's nearly $1 million for a 2,900-square-foot home on a one-acre lakefront lot.
A few serious inquiries have been made, Howell said, ``but we're not close to selling it yet. This is going to take one special buyer, because this is one special home.''
Meanwhile, architects who spearheaded the tour are brainstorming ways to make the house a public facility. Virginia Beach architects Bill George and Patrick Masterson - both of whom became acquainted with and inspired by the house as kids - would like to create a foundation and buy the home.
``It could be a window to the world of Frank Lloyd Wright,'' said Masterson. Masterson would like to obtain preservation status for the home through the National Trust for Historic Preservation and/or the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
He envisions tours to the home, modeled after the ones on March 2, when patrons parked at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts and rode a bus from there. The setup was designed to avoid disturbing the neighbors, Masterson said.
To offer a regular Wright house tour ``would help raise the profile of the area,'' he said. Aside from gauging interest through a tour, however, no action has been taken. No money has yet been raised.
On the Saturday afternoon of the tour, bus-load number four pulled up to a gravel driveway by a patch of bamboo. Patrons walked along a winding path that led to the house that Wright built. As they rounded a bend, the house came into view.
All eyes were drawn to the home's long, horizontal line below its low-pitched copper roof leading from a tiny, five-sided servant's quarters across a carport and on to the front entrance.
Wright never visited the site. He designed the home through extensive correspondence with Maude Kay Cooke and by examining a land survey and photos of the property.
The home's blond brick facade was a reminder that Wright designed his structures to flow with the surrounding natural environment. It is widely presumed he saw the sand-colored bricks as suggestive of the beach environment, though Maude Kay told a reporter in 1959 that the special bricks were not indigenous: They had to be ordered from Ohio and West Virginia.
Comfortably nestled among the trees, the house spreads across the site at an angle, taking full advantage of passive solar heating on its waterfront side facing south.
Inside, an enormous hearth marks the home's center - another Wright trait. The cement floor - painted Wright's signature ``Cherokee red'' - was heated from beneath by water-filled copper pipes, making it comfortable for sock feet in winter. The heat used to extend to the patio, but those pipes froze and burst one winter, Masterson said.
Built-in furniture designed by Wright and built by a local cabinetmaker fills the home. A long sofa hugs the length of the back wall. There are modular tables and ottomans and long, horizontal shelves that go with the flow of the wall paneling.
The Duhls, mindful of Wright's disdain for artwork marring his beautiful walls, have framed works propped on the floor, set in niches and on shelves.
Wright's love of nature is evident everywhere. In one bathroom, a large mirror and window meet at an odd angle, giving a sense of being outdoors.
There isn't a square room in the house. All spaces conform to the geometric disciplines that shaped the home - namely, a hemicycle living room area with a parallelogram wing extending east from the main circle segment.
``It was the first and only time Wright used those two geometries together in the same house,'' Masterson said.
William Allin Storrer, a leading Wright scholar, laid out the complex geometries of the Cooke house in his 1993 book, ``The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion.''
Storrer writes that the house consists of ``circular segments in the 90-degree `wide' living room, 60-120-degree equilateral parallelograms, attached neatly to the final radius, for the quiet space. One side of the parallelogram mates its grid to every other concentric circle.''
Interior walls are either brick or of wood paneling made from Tidewater red cypress with walnut battens. The unusual ceiling - like being inside a giant faceted jewel - is an expression of Wright's ``one-room house'' idea he worked with after World War II, where a collection of rooms would come under one large ceiling. The rooms were divided by partitions that stopped short of the ceiling. In the case of the Cooke house, bedroom walls do not reach the ceiling and offer only partial privacy.
The Cookes raised three children in this house, and one of them still lives in Virginia Beach. Bill Cooke, a charter boat mate and captain, recently visited the house for the first time in a decade. He agreed to be part of the tour - to represent the home's personal history, so to speak.
The son of the original owners of ``Fallingwater,'' Wright's most famous home in Bear Run, Pa., became an architectural historian.
Conversely, Bill Cooke made it clear he was no architecture fan.
``It was my mother that put all this mess together,'' he said. ``This was just the house I grew up in. It wasn't like everybody else's house. And everybody else made a big deal about where I lived.''
As a result, Bill's friends always wanted to play at his house. And in school, when the occasional reference was made about America's greatest architect, he would be singled out.
He was surrounded by reminders of his childhood. His old jungle gym - rusted and tilting - was camouflaged in a dense section of the woodsy yard. Inside the house, tucked in a ledge that ran the length of the room, he found his old toy planes.
``Basically, this house is as it was when I was growing up.''
The home wasn't designed with children in mind, he said. The Cookes had not anticipated adopting two boys and a girl; the siblings' mother was a woman who had been Maude Kay's client when she was a social worker. The woman already had nine children and could afford no more, Masterson said. So the Cookes adopted her next three kids.
Wright, ever the humanist, would have appreciated that the house's lasting impact on Bill Cooke was social: As a result of growing up in that house, he said, ``I always try to give everyone the space accorded them.''
Plus, he spent many years living in the tight servant's quarters. Masterson pointed out that the room has much in common with boats, which became the setting for Bill Cooke's work.
His mother, who masterminded the house with Wright over a 10-year period, had planned on a party house. ``Mother wanted to be the big socialite,'' Bill Cooke said. ``She liked to entertain.
``I know she really worked Frank Lloyd Wright to tears.''
While there was never a big, organized tour, ``mom was pretty open about the house,'' he said. ``She'd let groups in. Mom would've loved this. She'd have soared. It would've tickled her to death.
``Dad would've been in Williamsburg, and I'd have been in Hatteras.'' ILLUSTRATION: COLOR PHOTOS BY JIM WALKER/The Virginian-Pilot
In this Frank Lloyd Wright house on Crystal Lake, the
floor-to-ceiling windows across the main living area frame vignettes
of the landscape.
ABOVE: The cement patio is painted Wright's signature ``Cherokee
red.''
LEFT: Rooms come under one large ceiling divided by partial
partitions.
Photo
JIM WALKER/The Virginian-Pilot
A bathroom mirror and angled window give a sense of outdoors.
by CNB