Massaro House

[1] In 1949, architect Frank Lloyd Wright received a commission from engineer Ahmed Chahroudi[2] to build a house on a 10-acre (40,000 m2) island he owned in Lake Mahopac, Petre (alternatively spelled "Petra", from the Latin for "rock", reflecting the prominence where the home was to be constructed).

[3] Though he had seen the original Chahroudi commission drawings for the main home years earlier, he initially intended merely to restore the island's Wright-designed guest cottage.

[1] In spite of the three months that Wright had put into design work on the structure, all that survived were five drawings: a floor plan with ideas for built-in and stand-alone furniture, a building section, and three elevations.

[1] Massaro sold his sheet metal business in 2000 to focus on building the house, a fluid process that included solutions and adjustments made on the fly between 2003 and 2007.

These included changes to the skylight design and a staircase descending from the home like Fallingwater's, the addition of foam insulation, and an increase in the concrete's structural stability and to comply with modern building codes,[7] among others.

[9] Notably, William Allin Storrer, an adjunct professor of architecture and Wright historian, points to the desert masonry and skylight selection.

[10] Storrer argued that rocks set flush in Wright's signature desert masonry designs (as well as the native rocks used on Petra Island on the Chahroudi cottage that Wright designed and oversaw the construction of in lieu of building the proposed main home) project too far out from the concrete surface on the Massaro House, appearing to be distinct from one-another, randomly applied, and protruding at odd angles from otherwise finished walls.

Evading the aesthetic consequence of design choices made, Massaro countered that 4 inches (100 mm) of Styrofoam insulation had to be added in order to adhere to modern building codes, resulting in the stones projecting beyond the original dimensions.

Massaro explained that had the stairs been included in his design they would have descended into 3 feet (0.91 m) of water, disregarding that the flight could have been shortened to accommodate a raised lakebed or stone base in that immediate area.