Getting Wright Right

Malcolm Willey was a University of Minnesota vice president. His wife, Nancy, after reading Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography, wrote Wright in 1932 with what she thought was likely a vain request for a “creation of art” on an $8,000 budget. Wright responded, “Nothing is trivial because it’s small,” his graciousness belying his utter lack of work at the time. The end result was a red brick–and–cypress home sited on one of the last undeveloped lots in the rolling hills of Minneapolis’s Prospect Park. It is now known as the Willey House, a transitional design between Wright’s earlier Prairie School homes and the postwar “usonian” styles for the middle class.

While not considered one of Wright’s masterworks, it is one of only three remaining Twin Cities Wright homes, and the design is considered to represent the watershed of the second half of his architectural career. It is the subject of an autumn exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (September 29–January 20, 2008), rooted in a lovingly impractical five-year private restoration by Steve Sikora and his wife, Lynette Erickson-Sikora.

Steve Sikora and Lynette Erickson–Sikora.

Sikora, fifty-one, is a Minneapolis graphic designer. The home he bought in 2002 (from an elderly collector of Wright structures) had brick work mottled with mineral leaching from numerous leaks and large patches of exposed lathe where the plaster had fallen away. With the painstaking and precision craftsmanship of artisans Stafford Norris III and Joshua Norris, the Sikoras have brought the Willey House to a level of restoration that exceeds the original. “We noticed the study and guest and master bedrooms [lacked] the built-ins and other design features of the rest of the house,” Sikora says, “so we took a look at Wright’s original plans and added features Mrs. Willey probably decided to forego to stay in budget.”

The Sikoras and crew reclaimed the kitchen to its original appearance (from a 1970s makeover), including Wright’s signature “Cherokee Red” linoleum and original 1932 GE refrigerator and Hotpoint stove.

“The Net has helped a lot,” Sikora says. “Virtually all our sources for wood came from the Web. It’s how we found our custom brick maker in Tennessee.” He hasn’t added up the cost of the renovation yet. “I won’t allow myself to look at the number until it’s all done.”

The home’s in-line plan is familiar today, with the kitchen open to the dining and living room, a significant departure from the compartmentalized homes of the period. Floor-length glass living room doors blur the transition from inside to outside. Before I–94, the Willeys enjoyed a spectacular bluff-top view of the Mississippi. Now there is freeway noise.

Sikora says there are no plans for the house to be open on a regular basis, but “we’re talking about doing an open house with the MIA.” Sikora expects to open the house at least once, if not more, to members of The National Trust for Historic Preservation during its national convention in Minneapolis October 2–6. For more information, visit the National Trust for Historic Preservation.