Restoring Frank Lloyd Wright Boynton House
Prairie School · Restoration · Documentary
The Boynton House: The Next Hundred Years
Rochester, New York has exactly one Frank Lloyd Wright building. That single fact makes the Boynton House either a local treasure or an orphan, depending on who has owned it in any given decade. Its story — commission, completion, neglect, near-collapse, and resurrection — is as instructive as the architecture itself.
Wright designed the house in 1908 for Edward Everett Boynton, a successful lantern manufacturer whose personal life had been marked by grief: his wife died in 1900, and three of his four children died young. Boynton came to Wright through a business connection with Warren McArthur, for whom Wright had designed a Chicago house in 1892. His daughter Beulah, then twenty-one, had actually wanted Claude Bragdon — a Rochester architect and Wright contemporary — to design the house. Her father prevailed, and what resulted was something neither Rochester nor Wright's body of work had quite produced before.
"They have destroyed my house."
— Frank Lloyd Wright, on revisiting the Boynton House, 1932
The collaboration with Beulah was, by Wright's own account, unusually productive. Wright reportedly camped on-site during construction to stay in close contact with the client. The result is a mature Prairie composition: elongated T-plan, set sideways on the lot, with long horizontal bands of windows, low hipped roofs, wide overhanging eaves, and a deep verandah. Wright designed the furniture as well, seventeen pieces of which survive in the house. The total cost — house, lot, and furnishings — came to approximately $45,000–$50,000 in 1908 dollars, a figure that translates to roughly $10 million today.
The Boyntons left for New York City in 1918. What followed over the next ninety years was the familiar trajectory of a Wright house in private hands: lot subdivision, tennis court removed, gardens lost, the original open porch enclosed in glass, interior gutters replaced with exterior downspouts. Wright passed through Rochester in 1932 to deliver a lecture at the Memorial Art Gallery. He drove by East Boulevard. A witness recalled him banging his head on the car ceiling and shouting that they had destroyed his house. He never returned to Rochester.
The house changed hands multiple times over the following decades, accumulating both care and damage in roughly equal measure. By the time Jane Parker and Fran Cosentino purchased it in November 2009 for $830,000, the roof was sagging, the exterior wood was rotting, there was serious termite damage throughout the structure, and several basement support beams were missing. The house was, by multiple accounts, close to structural failure.
The Restoration
Parker had admired the house for ten years before it came to market. When multiple buyers made offers, the sellers chose Parker and Cosentino specifically because of their commitment to restore rather than simply possess it. What followed was a three-year effort involving more than 150 craftsmen working in close collaboration with the Landmark Society of Western New York, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and the city's Preservation Board. The work included structural repair, termite remediation, complete roof replacement, conservation of all 253 art glass panels, and restoration of the seventeen original Wright-designed furniture pieces. New furniture was also commissioned in the spirit of Wright's Prairie collaborator George Niedecken, referencing archival designs held at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
The grounds received equal attention. Wright's original pergola and pond — never built by the Boyntons — were finally realized from his drawings, with Bayer Landscape Architecture leading the effort. A sculpture by Albert Paley, inspired by the house's art glass patterns, was installed on the property. The original dirt cellar was converted by architect John Page into an archival room documenting the house's full ownership history, with photographs of Wright and the Boyntons alongside before-and-after documentation of the restoration.
The Boynton House is now listed as part of the East Avenue Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. It remains a private residence — one of the few Wright houses in the country that functions as an actual home rather than a museum. The distinction matters. Wright designed houses to be lived in, and the Boynton House, for the first time in decades, actually is.
The Documentary
Rochester's WXXI Public Broadcasting documented the restoration over two and a half years, producing the feature-length documentary Frank Lloyd Wright's Boynton House: The Next Hundred Years (2012). The film gives room-by-room access to the restoration process and features interviews with the owners, architectural historian Jean France, Boynton family descendant Carol Boynton Atwood, restoration contractor Eric Norden, and architect John Page. The full documentary is available via PBS and WXXI. The preview below offers a good introduction:
WXXI preview for Frank Lloyd Wright's Boynton House: The Next Hundred Years (2012). The full documentary is available at WXXI.org and on the PBS app.
Complementing the film, Kim Bixler — whose family owned the house from 1977 to 1994 — published Growing Up in a Frank Lloyd Wright House alongside the documentary's release. Bixler now lectures nationally on the experience of living within Wright's residential work.
As a case study in Wright restoration, the Boynton House is instructive precisely because it was never famous enough to attract institutional money — no endowment, no foundation rescue, just two owners who wanted it to survive. The 253 art glass panels are intact. The seventeen pieces of original furniture are conserved. The pergola Wright drew but never saw built is finally standing. That it took a century to get here is the sober part of the story. That it got here at all is the remarkable one.
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