Inside an architectural gem
After five-and-a-half years of restoration work, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Willey House in Prospect Park opened for a public open house in October. Some of the house’s 500 visitors on that bright fall day told co-owner Steve Sikora they had been waiting for years to see the house’s interior. (Those who didn’t make it will have to wait for the next tour or visit the Willey House website — info follows — to see the interior; the owners did not allow photographs to be taken inside the house.)
The house has been waiting for years to receive them, but it almost didn’t make it. Built in 1934, the Willey House had by 2002 fallen into a condition poor enough that it made the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota list of the state’s 10 Most Endangered Historic Properties.
“The house was lying fallow,” Sikora said.
Sikora and his wife, Lynette Erickson-Sikora, bought the property that same year with a “singular aim of restoring the house,” according to the Preservation Alliance, which last month gave the project a dual award: a Restoration/Rehabilitation Award and the first Charles Nelson Award for Excellence (named for the state historical architect who died earlier this year).
The couple — proprietors of Design Guys, a graphic design firm — were motivated not only by a love of Wright’s architecture and the house’s urgent need of rescuing, but also by what Sikora calls “a very strong interest in design.
“Wright is not always associated with design in a modern sense,” Sikora said. Modern design is sometimes seen as being about objects, while Wright’s buildings are total environments in which his hand can be found in every detail.
Lessons learned at Design Guys about design excellence helped guide the approach to the Willey House restoration. “The path was very clear,” Sikora said. While the results of their meticulous work plan are evident throughout the house, the details of the plan itself are available online at a website devoted to the project, www.thewilleyhouse.com, which won a 2004 Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission Award for community education.
The website is replete with images, information, and stories from the house’s past and present. At the outset of the project, Sikora researched the Willey House at libraries and archives from Los Angeles to Madison, Wisc., and locally at the Anderson Library on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank campus.
Lynette’s sons Stafford Norris III and Joshua Norris devoted themselves full-time to the restoration work over all five-and-a-half years. The house’s many unusual features required special attention, from brick floors inside and out to skylights organically connected to a trellis that projects from the house’s living room. Replacing the leaky skylights turned into a complex job of replacing metalwork that linked the skylights, trellis and the living room’s glass wall.
The house is sited on what Sikora called a “promontory,” overlooking the river gorge with a full horizon view that takes in both downtowns and landmarks such as the Sears tower (now the Midtown Exchange) and, poking above the treeline, the chimney of Sanford Junior High.
Interstate 94 passes below, with a freeway wall, but heavy windchimes in the yard (and a freeway wall running alongside the property) drown out much of the sound from its eight lanes of traffic.
Completion of the job feels “triumphant,” Sikora said. Visitors at the open house (which Sikora said would likely be held again someday) could likewise feel that sense of triumph in both the restoration work and Wright’s original design.
A special installation on view through Jan. 20 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ Gallery 302 explores Frank Lloyd Wright’s Willey House, along with another Wright design in Minnesota: the Lindholm Service Station in Cloquet. The installation includes original drawings from private collections and the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, as well as objects from the Willey House and photographs of the house’s restoration.
last revised: November 19, 2007