Joe Massaro likes a challenge. And he doesn't like getting bored.
So, as owner of Lake Mahopac's 10-acre Petra Island, he set out to build a house of dreams there.
Building a Lower Hudson Valley dream home can sometimes be fraught with challenges, but usually in conventional ways. Renovating an old house in an historic area, say, or pushing size limits with what some may deride as McMansions. There are scrutinizing land-use boards, historic preservationists, and, of course, neighbors.
But Massaro's quest differed from just about anything. He wanted to bring to life a would-be masterpiece that architectural great Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1949, but that was never built, for the 10-acre island in Putnam County.
Wright, who died in 1959, created
an architecture all his own, in the same way that people with only passing knowledge of art know a Picasso after they've seen one. Wright's "Prairie-style" houses, his often-noted home Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, and his Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan placed him in the canon of architects in college textbooks. His name is even in a Simon and Garfunkel song.
A home with history, on paper
Wright drew up designs for the Petra Island house for client Ahmed Chahroudi, an engineer who bought the isle in the late 1940s. While that house didn't get built then, Wright's design for a 1,200-foot cottagefor Chahroudi was built and exists on the island today.
Since he was a teenager, Massaro had dreamed of simply owning a house on the lake. It took a while, but he and his wife were finally able to afford one and, later, he also bought Petra Island in 1996. He spent years in the sheet metal industry, working his way up through various jobs to owning a contracting company. After selling the company, he said, he drove his new Mercedes convertible down to Florida and tried hitting the beach with books to read. But after a couple of weeks, Massaro said he needed to do something. Two months into running a software company with his son-in-law followed, but Massaro grew restless again.
"That's how the whole thing started," Massaro said about building the house. "I'd never, ever, ever thought I'd get to the end."
Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house, built anew, open to tours
He got to the end. These days, Massaro offers tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired home, known as Massaro House, as well as the Chahroudi Cottage and the grounds. A tour includes a boat ride out to the island. It has its ownwebsite, Wright Over Water: Petra Island.
Building the house took four years, completed in 2008.
But there was a time when it remained a series of challenges.
Many challenges to get it done
How to describe the house and copyright issues were a subject of a dispute between Massaro and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. They eventually settled on it as being inspired by Wright.
"No changes here," Massaro said of the house and the plans it was built from, saying he followed precisely the available drawings and documents.
Massaro said he added some modern conveniences such as air conditioning and things to meet codes, but that none of those are visible.
To get local approval, Massaro said he agreed to hold harmless the town because the police and fire departments had indicated they would not sign off on the project because they could not get out there to help.
"I've been working on it for two years with paperwork and permits and meeting with this guy and talking with that guy and, you know, I loved every minute," Massaro recalled.
Who could build a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house?
Massaro cast about for someone to build the place.
"You need artists out here to build this," he said. "That's one problem, but the other problem is the location," reachable out on a lake.
The solution, Massaro said, was Lidia Wusatowska, an aeronautical engineer and general contractor who had started building and renovating Mahopac homes.
Most of the time, materials were brought by boat. It took time.
"We brought wood, we brought Rebar, we brought mixers, we brought everything over the ice," Massaro said.
"If you needed gravel, right, you have to touch it five times before it gets into the building [site]. You drop it off on the mainland. You put it in 5-gallon buckets. You put it on the boat. You bring it out to the island," Massaro said. "You put it in your little truck, drive it up the hill, create another mound, and then use it to mix concrete."
Massaro described one winter where lake ice got so thick that some materials were taken by vehicles driven to the island.
And the house features a cantilevered deck that juts about 25 feet over the lake. Not exactly standard stuff.
Massaro said work on that involved enlisting a special engineer from New Orleans who did parking garages.
"Wow, but it was a fun project," Massaro said, adding that "most of all the sheet metal work I did myself; all the copper panels I installed."
Massaro added a detail to the home: a rooftop helicopter pad.
Step inside
Pictures and video show the house strikes an angular silhouette on the Petra Island coast, which sits close to Lake Mahopac's center.
Parts of the home have natural stones and rocky coast built into the design, as if the home grew out of them.
While the region's typical homes tend to stress more height and conventional shapes and forms -- say, a Tudor or a Colonial -- the Massaro House exudes sleek horizontality. Elements of it are reminiscent of Wright's Fallingwater. a home constructed in the 1930s that has been run as a museum with tours by a non-profit conservancy since the early 1960s.
Wright and his artisans not only created a house, but designed furniture, cabinets and other interiors details all meant to be part of an aesthetic.
Wright, who started his architectural practice near Chicago, in Oak Park, Illinois, created his Prairie style. "Inspired by the broad, flat landscape of America’s Midwest, the Prairie style was the first uniquely American architectural style of what has been called 'the American Century,' " the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust websitesaid.
"Ask the average citizen to name a famous American architect and you can bet that their answer will be Frank Lloyd Wright," the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation websitesaid. "Wright gained such cultural primacy for good reason: he changed the way we build and live."
Wright designed 1,114 architectural works of all kinds, 532 of which came to fruition, the foundation website said.
Tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Massaro House, as well as Chahroudi Cottage and the grounds, including a boat ride to Petra Island, are $150 a person. Information is at https://wrightoverwater.com/tours.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home comes to life on Lake Mahopac island
