Real Estate

A rare look inside Frank Lloyd Wright’s only NYC home

On a recent afternoon, Jeanne and Frank Cretella spotted some 30 bicyclists gathered in their driveway of their Staten Island house, gawking at its red roof, horizontal siding and rectangular rows of windows.

For the couple, who own the only New York City residence designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, dodging reverent onlookers is par for the course. When the weather’s nice, it happens every single weekend.

The uninvited guests know the Cretellas’ 1959-built prefabricated structure, located on a verdant hillside a 30-minute drive from the Staten Island Ferry, by its Wright-approved nickname: Crimson Beech.

The adjective references the color of its facade details, the noun a tree that once presided over the lot.

The four-bedroom house, built in 1959 and a designated landmark in Staten Island’s Lighthouse Hill neighborhood, retains Wright’s original design features, from facade details to interior wood paneling.NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission; Tamara Beckwith

“It really is a compliment to have someone who has made a trip to come see your home,” says Jeanne, 58, who, with her husband, operates event spaces in historic properties. “Other times, it can be a bit much. Like when you’re trying to enjoy a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning, and all of a sudden there’s someone peering into your window.”

To be sure, the Cretellas appreciate their local legend, with Wright-designed wooden touches from built-in cabinets to a dining room table that dates back to its erection, but also add that it’s a comfortable place to live. Purchased in 2004 for well under $1 million, the 3,750-square-foot abode has been a sentimental spot to raise daughter Madeline, now 24, all while honoring its architectural legacy.

In the study, wood shelving remains — topped with Wright-themed books the Cretellas collect.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Sculptures by Frank’s mother line the original wood-paneled hallway extending to the left of the entrance. Pocket doors that fold accordion-style (also Wright’s) lead to two bedrooms, a bathroom and a study, all across from storage Wright built into the house.

The rooms are illuminated by sunshine that filters through the home’s large-yet-inconspicuous windows. The Cretellas’ own eclectic furniture and colorful art collection sit beside mahogany tables — one for communal meals and several lightly embellished side tables — that the Midwestern architect designed specifically for Crimson Beech. Golden retriever Enzo, age 1½, snoozes beside the large fireplace Wright envisioned as the centerpiece of family activity.

And though the Cretellas only moved in 13 years ago, the home has been a part of their lives for almost as long as they can remember. Jeanne and Frank both grew up just blocks away in another part of Lighthouse Hill, a winding suburban neighborhood that offers views of New York Harbor when winter strips the trees bare of leaves.

Crimson Beech landed there, far from Wright’s main studios in Wisconsin and Arizona, by happenstance. It was part of a series of prefabricated homes conceived by Wright from 1956 onwards as a way of providing middle-class American families with beautiful, economical buildings. In 1957, when Wright told veteran broadcaster Mike Wallace about his commitment to affordable housing, a Queens resident named William Cass was listening. He and his wife Catherine had just bought a plot of land on Staten Island and were in the market for an architect. They wrote to Wright, asking him to build them a house — for under $35,000, if possible.

By that point, the superstar was nearing the end of his celebrated — and contentious — career. Known for (to name a standout) the iconic waterfall-topping house dubbed Fallingwater in rural Pennsylvania, Wright was, and remains, a household name — especially since his minimalist aesthetic dovetails seamlessly with today’s nostalgic obsession with midcentury modern design.

To the Casses’ surprise, Wright responded that he’d take on the project with the help of a Wisconsin prefabricated home builder, Marshall Erdman. Wright journeyed to New York to visit the site, set on making sure it was an appropriate environment for his work. He settled on a model simply dubbed “Prefab #1.” There would eventually be nine others like it across the country. While appearing to span just one story from the street, Crimson Beech has a hidden lower level — one of the customizations Wright made to the prefab, since many other models were just one floor — that hugs its steep hill. Wright, characteristically, wanted the home to be one with nature.

Its parts were delivered to Lighthouse Hill via a then-dirt road in four different truckloads in the late 1950s; the home was completed when Jeanne and Frank were toddlers. It ended up costing about $62,000.

As construction workers were putting the finishing touches on Crimson Beech, a Manhattan crew was preparing to open the Guggenheim museum — the only other Frank Lloyd Wright building in the city. Wright passed away at age 91 in April of 1959, just months before he planned to pay the city another visit, both to see the just-installed Cass prefab and witness the museum’s early visitors.

The hallway is wood-tastic.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Frank’s first memory of Crimson Beech is not from an architecture book — though the Cretellas have many of those now, several devoted to Wright, some even stacked on Wright-designed shelves — but from the window of a school bus when he was just 9 years old.

“I knew then it was special home, but I had no idea that it was his design or who he even was,” says Frank, 59. “It was always the famous house on the hill,” Jeanne adds.

The Cretellas met when they were adolescents; Jeanne’s family moved across the street from Frank’s. Winters were spent ice-skating on a frozen pond around the corner. During summers, Jeanne recalls, they’d ride dirt bikes through the trees.

They became high school sweethearts who later married and started to amass a food-service empire, starting with a concession stand at the Staten Island Zoo. Now, as principals of Landmark Hospitality, they own venues and restaurants like the 200-year-old Ryland Inn in Whitehouse Station, NJ. All along, the couple wanted to settle permanently in the idyllic neighborhood of their youth.

Frank oversees contractor work on the roughly 30 properties Landmark owns or leases. About 20 are historic buildings, designated by landmark conservancies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Moving into a Frank Lloyd Wright house, he laughs, was like bootcamp for restoring precious real estate.

“You definitely learn quite a bit when it’s the place you live [in],” Frank says. “You’re there every day, so you get a good sense of what needs to be done.”

Since move-in, the Cretellas have made upgrades while respecting the prefab’s decades-old bones. They converted much of its ample built-in storage into space more suitable for their family — adding a bedroom downstairs for their daughter and a wine cellar for their vast collection, to name just two. Out back, hidden from the street, they masterminded a large patio with cushy seating, which joins two other outdoor spaces perfect for entertaining along the banked hillside.

The kitchen and dining area have original cabinets and mahogany table, but the Cretellas opened up the floor plan and added modern appliances.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

The biggest changes, though, are in the kitchen: The experienced chefs removed the Formica countertops and added in a commercial-grade stove, oversize stainless steel hood and top-of-the-line appliances. They raised the room’s ceiling by taking out the Wright-designed storage above it. A small doorway into the kitchen got knocked wide open; the current open floor plan means the Cretellas’ Italian-American extended family can be involved in dinner preparations.

“It was really important to us to maintain the integrity of what we thought Frank Lloyd Wright would be okay with,” says Jeanne, as she prepares a lunch of pasta with broccoli and chickpeas in the bright kitchen they painted rusty orange. “But we knew that as times changed, [Wright] would have recognized that the kitchen is really the hub of the home — it’s not just a place where you fix a meal and bring it to the dining room.”

They feel closest to Wright when they’re admiring the natural beauty of Staten Island from their breakfast nook — or through any of the windows, really, that march along the entire back of the house in a neat line. It’s fitting, given that surrounding landscapes were always the inspiration and guiding principle of Wright’s designs. It’s positively bucolic: Barely any buildings can be seen from Crimson Beech’s vantage point, save for the nearby St. Patrick’s Church steeple, which pokes out through the trees.

1 of 7
The family dog Enzo sprawls out on the hardwood floors. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
Wright envisioned the fireplace as the centerpiece of the home.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
Advertisement
Wright designed this table with the original house.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
The Cretellas turned Wright's carport into a partially covered outdoor lounge. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
The Cretellas added an outdoor space overlooking their hillside. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post
Advertisement

“Sitting right here, you look out and it’s peaceful,” Jeanne says. “No matter what the weather is, no matter what the season is.”

Wright was famously particular about his homes, even well after they changed hands from architect to owner. He would design everything from the floor plan to the dish towels — which the Cretellas no longer have — and left specific directions for the Casses to maintain the aesthetic he intended. And they did.

The Cretellas at their house, a few years back.Vinnie Amesse

Catherine once told the Times that Wright was “a real tyrant. … He never took anyone else into consideration. He chose the furniture, the fabric, even the paint colors for us.”

Jeanne wishes she had the chance to talk to the Casses — seeing as hpw they were the commissioners who truly brought Wright to New York City — and get a sense for Wright’s broader wishes for the house. The Cretellas actually had the opportunity to buy the house directly from the Cass family five years prior to their 2004 purchase, but the timing was off. Another family bought it and lived there in the interim.

So when the Cretellas, who still had family and friends (and therefore eyes and ears) in the neighborhood, got wind that the other family was planning to move to Alaska, they bought the house directly from them for “pretty much what that family had bought it for,” Jeanne says. (The Casses had sold it to the Alaska-bound family for $800,000, according to Curbed. The second owners didn’t relay much historic documentation; when the Cretellas moved in, they found minimal direction for Crimson Beech’s maintenance — and a lot of fixing up to do.

Take the leaks. There were dozens. And for a home whose interior is almost completely lined with rare mahogany wood from the Philippines, the dripping streams were like minefields, Frank says.

The extremely horizontal exterior is trademark Wright, but the home actually has a lower story hidden from the street he added upon request.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

“It had been badly neglected,” says Jeanne, as she pulls out the only extant instructions, handed down from Wright’s associate, which dictate the kind of paint the exterior of the home requires: two coats of Moore-o-Matic exterior grade paint for the cream-colored masonite outer walls.

The upkeep of a house like theirs, whose exterior is a designated New York City Landmark, means constant repair work. The Cretellas are accustomed to stringent preservation rules that govern their work properties. Still, it’s one of the main reasons they don’t often open the home to the dozens of interested onlookers who walk by each week. (2006 marked the last time Crimson Beech was photographed by media.) Fortunately, Frank’s contracting team can address most of their needs, but the cost to constantly maintain the aging structure ends up being about $25,000 a year, he says. They’re currently considering refinishing the house’s exterior wood. Even though he and his team will do all the labor, he expects the project will cost $7,000.

“The house is never ready,” Jeanne says. “There’s always so much to do.”

Wright scrawled his signature on a rare red plaque in Crimson Beech’s entryway.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Jeanne did allow in one set of lookie-loos many years back. She saw a group gazing through the window next to the front door at a small, square red plaque set in the mahogany entryway wall. Inside the clay plaque is Wright’s signature. The peeping Toms were, it turns out, historians from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. (The Cretellas have plans to attend the conservancy’s NYC conference honoring Wright’s 150th birthday this week.)

The history buffs were excited about the plaque.

“When they saw that, they said, ‘Never, ever touch that,’ ” Jeanne recalls. The experts explained that there are only about 30 signed plaques out of more than 400 completed Wright homes nationwide.

The Cretellas feel they were destined to be Crimson Beech’s gatekeepers. The couple felt the same way when, the night they bought the house, Wright came up in a “Jeopardy!” round. They felt it during countless small yet memorable interactions, like the time their daughter’s third grade teacher asked if she could bring the entire class on a field trip — to Crimson Beech.

The publicly famous, carefully guarded home was meant to be theirs.

“It’s not just something we fell in love with,” Jeanne says. “It’s special to everyone.”