Frank Lloyd Wright blueprints and land in Ludington are for sale decades after the job was commissioned

Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1940s designed a home to be nestled
amid the sandy swales of Ludington’s Lake Michigan shoreline. Beth
Dilley, who inherited the plans the famed architect drew up, thinks
it’s about time someone built it.

So she’s selling a piece of Lake Michigan shoreline property and
the architectural drawings as a package, with a Grand Rapids,
Michigan, developer ready to build a new Wright home more than 50
years after the architect’s death.

Dilley and her husband, Frederick, already have a cottage on the
property originally intended for Wright’s design. But they acquired
a nearly identical parcel in recent years, and Beth came to realize
she could complete the dream of her uncle who commissioned Wright
to design the home.

The story of the Wright home that didn’t become reality but
still might begins in 1942 with a window designer for the old J.L.
Hudson department store in downtown Detroit. George Berdan was on
vacation with a friend along the Lake Michigan shoreline when they
became caught in heavy fog. They decided to spend the night in
Ludington.

“They found a little cabin that they rented for the night,”
Dilley says. “When they woke up, the fog had lifted and George was
stunned. You get up in that high bluff property, you get such a
view” of the Lake Michigan shore. Berdan embraced that view and
soon found a vacant parcel for sale, a four-acre lot on a high
bluff with 200 feet of lake frontage.

“He just fell in love with the property and ended up buying it,”
Dilley says.

Berdan married soon after buying the property, but his wife,
Grace, died unexpectedly in June of 1945. Soon afterward, perhaps
as a way to start again, he wanted to move to the shoreline land he
bought in Ludington.

“He had a love for art and zeal for art,” Dilley says. Berdan
was a graduate of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts school of
art, known for creating design that focused on the human element
for the workplace and home, in contrast to Henry Ford’s
machine-inspired production line. When he traveled to Europe with a
few of his friends from school, he came back with works by Picasso,
Modigliani and Paul Klee. Berdan’s artistic interest and the
principles of design he learned shaped his vision of the home he
wanted to build. When he began looking for an architect, everyone
he talked to said the one he needed was Wright.

But other architects also told Berdan “you’ll never get him,”
Dilley said. That didn’t deter Berdan. “He was very impulsive.” So
he wrote to Wright in September of ’45, asking him to consider
designing a home for the property in the $6,000 to $7,000
range.

To the surprise of everyone except perhaps Berdan, Wright wrote
back the following month: “We do bachelor houses. The sum you
propose is small, but if you want to risk it—we’ll try.” Wright
provided presentation drawings by November. Wright’s schedule and
the press of other projects, however, pushed the final delivery of
the plans to 1948.

The home Wright designed was one of his Usonian line of houses,
though some like Berdan’s were never built. Usonian houses were
typically small, single-story homes, though the one he designed for
Berdan had two stories. Usonian homes featured a strong visual
connection between the home’s interior and the land around it. They
used native materials and featured flat roofs and large,
cantilevered overhangs for natural cooling in the summer and
passive solar heating in the winter.

Wright envisioned the Usonian home as fitting a middle-class
family’s budget such as the one Berdan proposed, though the
building costs often rose as the architect finalized his design.
For the Ludington site, Wright drew up a long rectangular plan with
a dramatic two-story living room that included 18 feet of French
doors opening to the southwest view of the lake. A bedroom and
bathroom were on one end of the home off the living room. A second
bedroom/studio and bathroom took up the entire second floor with a
balcony overlooking the living room.

The design was everything Berdan was looking for, but “George
never found himself in a position where he could put together the
resources to build it,” Dilley said. Instead, “he moved a very
small one-room school house onto the property. It’s been added on
to for many, many years. Now it’s sort of the typical Lake Michigan
cottage.”

Berdan, however, didn’t live there long. As beautiful as the
view was, he discovered he wasn’t made for winters on the Lake
Michigan shore.

“He only lived up in Ludington for maybe seven or eight years,
and then actually he moved down to Florida and ended up building a
place in Sarasota,” Dilley says. He sold the Ludington property to
his sister and her husband, Beth Dilley’s parents. Yet Dilley’s
uncle never gave up on Wright’s plans.

“I can remember as a kid, George would pull out the drawings and
he and I would sit and look at them. He had all the details, the
trim. I can remember being fascinated by the mechanics because it
has a heated floor. He would pull these out and George and I would
talk about them,” Dilley says.

In the late ’60s, Berdan loaned the drawings to an Atlanta
gallery for a showing of Wright’s works. He asked the gallery,
however, to send the drawings to his niece when the show
closed.

Dilley admits the timing was never right for her to build the
home Wright designed on Berdan’s original property. For one thing,
her own children would be aghast if they tore down the schoolhouse
cottage they’ve come to love. But her father bought some property
about a half mile north in the ’70s, and Dilley and her husband
were able to buy property adjacent to the still vacant lot six
years ago. They came to realize the lot’s similarity to the one
Berdan purchased gave them an opportunity to see the home Wright
designed finally built. They contacted Kevin Einfeld of BDR Custom
Homes about selling the land and the construction of the Wright
home as a package.

Einfeld says there are only a handful of Wright’s Usonian homes
that have never been built. “It’s just an honor to be attached to
something like this.”

Yet he’s faced with the challenge of taking the plans for a home
designed to 1945 standards while incorporating current building
codes and modern technology. “A lot of the things will be the
same,” Einfeld says. “Brick is brick.” Many of the changes,
however, will be in “the bones of the house,” the structure of the
home that’s hidden when it’s completed. Wright’s flat roofs have a
tendency to leak, and the cantilevered overhangs are prone to
sagging.

With modern materials, “there’s just a significant increase in
strength and stability,” Einfeld says.

While Wright’s designs incorporate passive solar heating and
cooling, the heating system “back then was just a basic furnace.
We’re going to do this right with a geothermal system,” Einfeld
says.

Einfeld says he could bring in an architect to redo the plans,
keeping the original design but incorporating structural and
mechanical upgrades. Yet emotionally, he wants to maintain a
connection with the past and work from the original drawings, using
architectural addenda as needed to cover the upgrades.

Dilley and Einfeld are listing the property and construction of
the Berdan house at approximately $1.5 million. Not exactly the
middle-class affordability Wright envisioned for his Usonian homes,
but Einsfeld described it as within the range of similar-sized
modern homes built along Lake Michigan.

The size of the home, he says, is actually a reflection of
current trends in housing, moving away from the bloated McMansions.
“We’re redefining what the American home is like. It’s definitely a
lot smaller, invoking the Usonian house. What is the new American
home like? We’re puling this plan out, and it’s closer to where
we’re heading.”

It was a direction Wright understood, and apparently so did
Berdan. Dilley says Berdan died in the late ’90s, but he never lost
his love of art and humanistic design. “He was a very unique man
with a great love of art and architecture.”

 

 

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