The new owner of a historic Frank Lloyd Wright house is working to bring a modern update to the century-old home. No, owner Samantha Lotti isn't planning to demolish any part of the architectural wonder. Rather, her updates seek to make the house more climate-friendly.
Lotti recently outlined her extensive climate-minded renovations to The Wall Street Journal, giving an inside look at the environmentally conscious historic preservation project.
For those not in the architectural know, Wright was a prolific 20th-century architect, creating more than 1,000 structures in his 70-year career. His most famed include Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Called the Oscar B. Balch House, Lotti's home is a 1911 prairie-style building named for its first owner. Lotti purchased the Oak Park, Illinois, house in 2016 for $1.1 million after falling in love with its innovative architecture, including 49 single-paned windows.
As beautiful as they are, those huge windows also contributed to making the home an environmental nightmare that lacked essential insulation. In fact, during a 2019 polar vortex, Lotti told the Journal she ran the gas-fired boiler-and-radiator heating system at full blast. Even still, she couldn't get the indoor temperature to rise above 55 degrees. Cooling the house in summer was equally difficult.
Lotti, a self-described environmentalist, then endeavored to bring the house to "net zero," which means removing the same amount of pollution from the air as one puts in. But that has proved to be a costly endeavor. An $800,000 endeavor, to be exact.
"It is extremely unusual to do a historic restoration that is so environmentally focused," Marsha Shyer, who chairs the homeowner committee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, told the Journal. Shyer added that owners of historic homes usually just live with their energy inefficiency — a cost of owning a piece of history.
To improve the historic house's energy efficiency, Lotti made changes to reduce the need for heating and air conditioning. This included insulating the 49 original windows, which have interesting geometric patterns true to Wright's style. Lotti installed interior storm windows to help keep the cold in and the warm out.
But the most costly and largest repair was replacing a gas-burning furnace and water heater with a geothermal system for heating and cooling the home. With the complex system, Lotti no longer uses gas to heat her home. Lotti also replaced the roof, insulated the space below the roof, and redid the ductwork to be more energy-efficient. To insulate, contractors used a spray foam that emits less pollution than traditional foam insulation.
All the repairs were done by contractors with experience in historic preservation. "You always have to go up a level for Frank Lloyd Wright," Lotti told the Journal.
The house underwent a blower door test before all of the renovations, which measures how much air is entering or escaping a home. Three years later, Lotti performed another test after installing the storm windows, insulating the second-floor ceilings, and replacing the roof. The house came closer to passing than three years prior but still failed the test mostly because of the exterior walls. But Lotti says the estimated cost of insulating those walls was "prohibitive."
Soon, Lotti plans to install rooftop solar panels to help the house get closer to her net-zero goal. But, for now, she is taking a break from the constant construction.
Through these extensive renovations, Lotti has made the historic house fully electric except for two wood-burning fireplaces, giving it the potential to operate without emitting harmful carbon pollution. All it needs is a source of clean electricity — such as those soon-to-come solar panels.
But Lotti's climate-minded changes don't end at the house's physical structure. She is also
converting the property's ordinary lawns to gardens filled with native plant life that will help support local pollinators.
"We discovered what was possible, which is that the house could become significantly more energy efficient. Just like in medicine, we experiment," Lotti, who practices Chinese medicine in Oak Park, told the Journal. "We come up with an idea that we think is going to be a solution, and then we discover that it isn't. Humanity is all about trial and error. You don't know unless you try."
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