Frank Lloyd Wright house in Phoenix turns neighbors into foes

• The David and Gladys Wright House Foundation plans ticketed tours%2C events%2C a cafe and bookstore.
• Some Arcadia neighbors fear a house museum will create traffic%2C noise and %22commercial activity.%22
• Sign up for free private tours of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home at DavidWrightHouse.org.

Until recently, Zach Rawling has been a little mysterious, much like the David and Gladys Wright house he bought more than two years ago to rescue it from the wrecking ball.

The native Arizonan grew up less than three miles from the futurist concrete-block home that Frank Lloyd Wright, America's most famous architect, designed for his son, David.

Rawling was lauded by the design community as an anonymous hero when he quietly closed on the house for nearly $2.4 million just before Christmas 2012. But his David and Gladys Wright House Foundation is now facing some resistance from powerful neighbors.

A 33-year-old former homebuilder with a law degree, Rawling is stepping, a bit reluctantly, into the fray and limelight as foundation president. For two years, he has been restoring the house and its interior to its 1952 glory.

But his vision is larger. Rawling, supported by a network of Wright experts and local art enthusiasts, wants the site to be a museum, a cultural hub for the community, a celebration of architecture and the arts that can inspire future generations.

That means opening the doors to kids and tourists, which has some residents in Arcadia, one of Phoenix's most expensive neighborhoods, concerned about traffic, noise and "commercial activity" in their backyard.

"It appears to be a commercial project in a residential neighborhood," said Jordan Rose of Rose Law Group, who represents one of the home's closest neighbors.

The view at this iconic structure, near 54th Street and Camelback Road, is startlingly different from the neglected lot Rawling purchased. A sea of sculptural, steel-edged green lawn surrounds the spiraling cement-block house, and pristine paths line the 5.6-acre property with views framing Camelback Mountain.

"Everything you see is about honoring the building the way (Wright) wanted. It's been about highlighting the architecture again," Rawling said.

In the past two years, Rawling acquired three homes next to the Wright property and razed them to help recreate the landscape (originally 10 acres) as Frank Lloyd Wright saw it when he titled his blueprints for the house, "How to Live in the Southwest."

Many consider it one of Wright's best designs — not nearly as well-known as Fallingwater or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, but not out of their league. A precursor to the Guggenheim, Rawling believes it to be Wright's last residential masterpiece. Wright died in 1959.

A prominent Wright scholar and author agrees.

"I do consider the David and Gladys Wright house to be one of Wright's most significant and unusual buildings," said Neil Levine, Harvard University's Emmet Blakeney Gleason research professor of history of art and architecture. "It certainly figures among the top 20 designs he did. This is a figure based on the analysis we did of his work for the World Heritage List nomination."

After Rawling toured the property with his mother, Katharine Rawling, they brainstormed how they could share it with students and the public. Every summer when he was growing up, Rawling and his mom visited architecturally significant buildings — from Wright's Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and S.C. Johnson Wax building in Wisconsin to Robie House in Chicago. A former elementary school teacher, Katharine started architecture school. She quit to raise her family, but passed along her passion.

"It was a great part of my childhood, this love of architecture," said Rawling, who remembers as a kid thinking the David Wright house was mysterious and intriguing. Few pictures existed of the interior. David and Gladys Wright were notoriously private, and both lived more than a century.

Asked if he ever considered making the Wright home his own residence, Rawling immediately shakes his head.

"This is one of the defining works of Frank Lloyd Wright's career," he said. "It's too special a place. ... It's part of our shared history. I want this to be part of the fabric of cultural life in the city."

The David and Gladys Wright House Foundation recently launched its website, DavidWrightHouse.org, and has been inviting in the curious who sign up for small, free private tours. Rawling also has a long-term lease on 130 parking spaces at the Camelback Church of Christ at 52nd Street and Camelback Road, and is proceeding with ambitious plans for a house museum and 25,000-square-foot educational center, cafe and gift shop.

The plan is for the center to be built underground, with a ramp spiraling downward around a sunken reflecting pool, so it doesn't detract from the current landscape. Construction won't happen for several years, after the restoration is complete and money has been raised.

But its description has drawn the ire of one of the Wright home's closest neighbors, billionaire Peter Sperling, the head of Apollo Education Group, parent company of University of Phoenix.

In a recent Arizona Republic guest column, Sperling blasted what he called the commercialization of the property along with potential traffic and noise. "Wright House, Wrong Place" fliers have circulated the neighborhood, and the website PreserveArcadia.com, filled with photos of tour buses, urges neighbors to oppose the house-museum plans.

At the end of May, the David and Gladys Wright House Foundation will apply for a special permit to open the house to the public for ticketed tours, educational programs and cultural events, and to have a museum cafe and bookstore. Public hearings will follow in the coming months and will likely draw vocal debate on both sides.

Rose, whose firm represents the Sperlings, said they oppose the special permit.

"Restoration is absolutely welcome, but commercialization is just not," Rose said. "When someone buys a historic home, you don't have the expectation that you can open it up to commercial activity… They are proposing a commercial venture, a concert venue. That use is not compatible with the quiet residential neighborhood that Arcadia has always been."

Rawling said he will host some performances — including jazz, classical music and dance — which is a Taliesin tradition. And, as as a cultural center that celebrates family and community, the Wright house also may host weddings, capped at a dozen a year.

"This is certainly not a Wright-themed wedding chapel," he said.

Rawling also is planting 200 citrus trees and building a grass bowl on the northwest corner of the property, inspired by the Heard Museum's sunken amphitheater. A sound engineer is adding a berm there and, through more plantings and noise meters, will keep sound to levels no higher than that of a lawn mower, he says.

He believes his long-term parking arrangement off Camelback Road will stop traffic from entering the neighborhood. Rose said Rawling's parking agreement is not adequate for the amount of visitors he's projecting.

Through Rose Law Group, the Sperlings have told the city they are "willing to assist in an effort to relocate the home to an area where outside visitors and commercial activity will be more appropriate and compatible."

In February, Alan Stephenson, Phoenix's planning and development director, responded, "Most Americans would never dream of moving Fallingwater. The subject property should be treated with the same degree of respect, as it represents one of Wright's most significant works ... Moving the building would likely be viewed in the same light as demolition — that Phoenix had failed to step up and adequately protect one of its greatest architectural treasures."

Rawling said the pushback in Arcadia has been a surprise. Inviting the public in requires amenities, such as handicapped restrooms, which would be in the education center.

Many in Arcadia support his efforts, having taken private tours and attended events at the house, including an Easter egg roll for that drew hundreds of kids on the velvet lawn.

Rawling continues to move ahead on the home's restoration, which should start this summer and take two to three years. If and when a special permit is granted, he said the deed to the house will be transferred to the David and Gladys Wright House Foundation, which will accept a historical overlay to forever protect the house from demolition.

Lynda Waggoner, director of Fallingwater and vice president of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy that worked to help save the building, doesn't see house museum-goers as a rowdy bunch.

"They're quiet people. They're respectful people. They're just people who love architecture," she said. Plus, "There's a significant buffer around that building."

Rawling was a custom homebuilder in Las Vegas, working with Wallace Cunningham, when the two met for dinner in October 2012.

Cunningham, a San Diego-based designer, was following the plight of the David and Gladys Wright house. Having studied at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Cunningham was a huge fan of the house and once visited David and Gladys there. He asked Rawling to sign a petition to help save it.

Instead, two days later, Rawling flew to Phoenix and offered to buy it. His first offer was flatly rejected, and some tense negotiations ensued.

A Brophy College Preparatory class of 2000 graduate, Rawling earned an economics degree from the University of Virginia and headed to UCLA for law school. From there, he moved to Nevada to clerk for a federal judge. Before his clerkship ended, Rawling's father, John Rawling, a Phoenix attorney with Fennemore Craig and later president of Robertson Aviation, died in 2008.

Losing his 60-year-old father made Rawling reevaluate his life plan, and he chose building and architecture over real-estate law. Some day, Rawling said, he may build custom homes in Arizona, but now his hands are full.

He moved from Nevada to Arcadia last year, and lives just blocks from the Wright house. This summer, workers will re-install the original courtyard swimming pool, but as a shallow reflecting pool (the original concrete-block pool was not watertight). They'll shore up the cantilevered master bedroom and fix areas of the ramp that were damaged from water soaking through built-in planters.

Rawling plans to restore the metal roof to its original turquoise and the concrete ramp, floors and countertops to Cherokee red. The exterior red tile that bears Frank Lloyd Wright's signature also will be reattached. Wright was known to have put the single tile on only about 30 to 40 buildings that he considered works of art.

"It's the signature on the painting," Rawling said, adding he hopes to keep the home open for tours through the restoration. "That's a perfect teaching opportunity."

In the first 18 months after purchasing the home, Rawling toured other house museums in the United States and Europe with Wallace and Pam Cunningham. Some of their favorites were the Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, England, and Vaux-le-Vicomte outside Paris.

"Our best experiences were when it still felt like a family home, and you were visiting as a guest of the family," Rawling said. "It's hard to see any house museums do anything but enhance the living around them."

With help from Wright family members and their personal photos, he has recreated every main fixture of the original interior — from an original rug by Wright called "March Balloons" to a black Steinway piano the same vintage as the one David Wright played.

The home has already welcomed thousands, including architects from six continents. Waggoner assembled her advisory board members here in November 2013 to marvel at the house and taught Rawling how to vertically stack wood in the kiva-style fireplaces.

Rawling also welcomed Ling Po, Frank Lloyd Wright's chief renderer and graphic artist, who drew the March Balloons rug based on Wright's sketches. In 2013, Po sat in the living room and sketched additional embellishments to the colorful reproduction carpet that now extends throughout the 2,200 square-foot house. Po died in April 2014, on his 97th birthday.

Sarah Levi also has moved in as the home's first scholar in residence. The great granddaughter of David and Gladys Wright, Levi wakes up in the house and leads private tours. Her master's thesis was on the feasibility of turning the house into a museum. And her family is solidly behind Rawling's plan.

"There are not words to describe how forever grateful my family will be to him," Levi said.

Her mother, Anne Wright-Levi, remembering vividly the days of worrying the house would be bulldozed, simply called Rawling "an angel."

From the conversation that sparked all this more than two years ago, Cunningham said he never expected Rawling to buy the home.

"I really didn't think the house had a prayer," he said. "This is real philanthropy. I thought all those people were gone."

Rawling said he especially loves giving tours to kids. They love its drama. The swirling ramp ascending to the elevated living quarters, the Romeo and Juliet balcony, the curved roof and decorative fascia that evoke everything from a castle to a dragon.

"Kids get it immediately," Rawling said. "This is a project my mom and I will share the rest of our lives. She wants every first- through third-grade child to be able to tour this on a field trip. ... Fundamentally, it's about arts education and cultural programming."

Meanwhile, Rawling is still learning from this house. From it, he has watched a perfectly framed Camelback Mountain turn blazing red for 90 seconds just before sunset. He believes it was Wright's most audacious, futuristic design, complete with the latest technology — even air-conditioning. Midcentury Phoenix and Frank Lloyd Wright, at their shining moment.

"The design at its core is a really joyful one." Rawling said. "This really was the house of the future for Wright. ... It's an extraordinary place."

Reach the reporter at kara.morrison@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4857.