Massaro House is an architecturally significant residence on privately owned Petre Island in Lake Mahopac, New York, roughly 50 miles north of New York city. Inspired by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the home's design and construction have had a complex and controversial history. Wright's plan was initially known as the "Chahroudi House", for the client who commissioned it back in 1949, and for whom Wright designed and built a much smaller cottage on the island when his proposal for the main home proved prohibitively expensive for the local engineer.
In 1996 sheet metal contractor Frank Massaro acquired Petre island and the long dormant drawings for the main home. In developing a plan to construct the home with numerous modifications, including some reflecting improved systems and technologies, a conflict arose over the project's authenticness with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which successfully legally disputed Massaro's right to refer to the structure as a Wright design.
Due to the subsequent out-of-court settlement between Massaro and the foundation the home can only be described as being "inspired by Wright" rather than a faithfully rendered, certified Wright design.
Concept
In 1949, architect Frank Lloyd Wright received a commission from engineer Ahmed Chahroudi to build a house on a island he owned in Lake Mahopac, Petre (alternatively spelled "Petra", from the Latin for "rock", reflecting the prominence where the home was to be constructed). Chahroudi would later state that during a lunch meeting with Wright and Edgar Kaufmann, the owner of Wright's celebrated Fallingwater, the architect told Kaufmann: "When I finish the house on the island, it will surpass your Fallingwater".
Wright worked on designing a one-story, house for three months, but the project was cancelled when Chahroudi realized he would not be able to afford either the $50,000 budget that Wright envisioned for the home or a second more modest version he requested. Instead, he had Wright build a three bedroom guest cottage the architect had designed for the island (known today as the A. K. Chahroudi Cottage), later occupying it with his family as a summer retreat.
Design
In 1996, Petre Island was purchased for US$700,000 by Joseph Massaro, a sheet metal contractor. Though he had seen the original Chahroudi commission drawings for the main home years earlier, he initially intended merely to restore the island's Wright-designed guest cottage.
Massaro received Wright's main house renderings as part of the purchase of the island. In spite of the three months that Wright had put into design work on the structure, all that survived were five drawings: a floor plan with ideas for built-in and stand-alone furniture, a building section, and three elevations. Massaro hired Thomas A. Heinz, an architect and Wright historian, to complete the unfinished design.
Heinz employed Archicad Building Information Modeling (BIM) software to model aspects of Wright's design not self-evident in the original renderings. His design also provided updated heating and cooling solutions such as air conditioning and radiant heating that were not part of the original Wright concept. The design as built features chimney caps — to which Wright characteristically took exception — at each of the home's six fireplaces.
In common with Fallingwater, the house's design does not merely accommodate but actually incorporates the local topography. A -high, -long rock forms the exterior to the entry and an interior wall, while a smaller rock doubles as a kitchen and bathroom wall. Again, like Fallingwater's signature terraces, the house features a cantilevered deck that stretches over Lake Mahopac. Its -high living area is illuminated with 26 triangular skylights.
Massaro sold his sheet metal business in 2000 to focus on building the house, a fluid process that included solutions and adjustments made on the fly between 2003 and 2007. These included changes to the skylight design and a staircase descending from the home like Fallingwater's, the addition of foam insulation, and an increased in the concrete's structural stability and to comply with modern building codes, among others.