Kentuck Knob

The second half of our daytrip was a visit to Kentuck Knob, the last of the three Frank Lloyd Wright properties in southwestern Pennsylvania. We had already toured Polymath Park one Fourth of July with my parents, and the two of us stopped by Fallingwater on a frigid early spring day. While waiting for our guided tour to begin, we tried to count up all the other FLW visits we have made together: Taliesin, Oak Park, Hollyhock House, and Southern Florida University (which I still need to write). Maybe post-pandemic we'll make it out to Taliesin West.

Kentuck Knob was a late-career design from Wright for Isaac Newton (I.N.) and Bernadine Hagan, friends of the Kaufmanns at Fallingwater. He was in the dairy and ice cream business. She named it for a pioneer who liked the land so much that he didn't bother moving on west to Kentucky, and for the fact that the top of the hill was bare of trees when they purchased the land in 1953. Apparently Wright divided his clients into "perchers or nesters"--people who would rather be up above everything or down in a valley, and the Hagans were "perchers." The house is built according to Usonian properties and sits 2,050 feet above sea level. They moved in in 1956.

The ranch-style house is built into the hillside and shaped like four sides of a hexagon. In the first photo above I snapped the art studio and the carport, and in this second image you can see the bedroom wing to the left and the living room to the right. The original copper roof reportedly inspired rumors of a UFO landing (it was the 1950s, after all), so it was treated to speed up the weathering process. I found the decorative gourds to be picturesque and asked our guide to photograph us, but because of the slant of the afternoon sun she had to change the angle.

Of all the custom designs FLW did, the abstract cut-outs for these under-eave windows may be my least favorite. They don't let in very much light, so Mrs. Hagan had to make her art in the gravel courtyard instead. When Mr. Hagan got too old to live out in the middle of nowhere, the couple sold the property in 1986 to Lord Peter Palumbo, an English developer and collector of both art and architecture. He stayed in the property while in the States for 10 years (1986-1996). Unfortunately, a landscaper parked a recently used lawnmower in the attached shed space, where there was a gas heater. Things combusted, and they had to make major repairs before the house could be opened for public tours. Until the pandemic, Palumbo and his wife Hayat (herself an artist) used to come back with new items to display and rearrange--like a collection of wooden duck decoys in the kitchen--but now they stay in a farmhouse just down the way.

We weren't allowed to take any photographs inside, so I can't show you the large living room with the 28-foot orange-cushioned built-in bench sofa; the cabinet for hiding the television (an abominable and faddish technology, according to Wright); the inside/outside window box; the collection of low-slung FLW chairs; the enormous stone fertility god statue Mrs. Hagan left behind because she didn't want to pay to move it; the awkwardly placed and unusable fireplace; the bedroom art displays reached down narrow passages; or the basement (!). I was particularly enamored of the "murphy-bed" range from General Electric, whose burners folded up against the wall to provide more counter space when not being used. The guide also mentioned the difficulty in the 1950s of finding a refrigerator with sharp angles like in the rest of the house, because the trend at the time was for rounded edges, remember?

Outside we could glimpse the thin autumn sunshine through a skylight in the balcony roof and enjoy the sound of the water feature on the back patio. Our guide was proud of the local craftsmen who had cut the stone for the walls, and the carpenters who spent 2 years cutting the thousands of feet of dental molding. You can see some around the hexagonal opening to the left. It was too expensive to haul the ingredients needed to pour Wright's trademarked "Cherokee red" cement floors, so they also used local slate for that.

It ended up being just the two of us on this particular tour, which lasted just over an hour. Having come up by shuttle bus, we decided to return on foot and picked up a map of the sculptures on the property. Next stop: the overlook. The very first photo in this post is my favorite image from the whole trip, a selfie of my delight and his bemusement, sitting on a stone bench looking at Sugarloaf Mountain and a country road on which there were sometimes no cars. It was so quiet and peaceful. When our butts were cold, we finally followed the walking path around the property and back to the visitors center, where we promptly ordered scoops of Hagan ice cream, which we ate outside on the back deck in the sun and fresh air.

No trip is without its adventures with us; during this one, Dear Husband realized several miles too late that we were in danger of running out of gas in the middle of nowhere aka Ohiopyle, PA. So we spent the time while eating lunch in the one open restaurant strategizing about how to get to the nearest gas station. On the way, we listened to more of The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast, something I found a year or two ago that consists of a pair of American brothers who LOVE the old Granada television series. While some of the podcasts are interviews with actors, most consist of a blow-by-blow retelling of an episode (with sound from the original), followed by Gus and Luke dissecting what they did and didn't like about the acting, directing, and cinematography. Mostly they like everything. Each episode is rated out of 10 Persian slippers (you know, to go with Sherlock's silk dressing gown). Then they share fan mail. DH is also a fan of this retelling of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, most of which we own on DVD, and it's become a tradition to listen to one or two of these while making long car trips.

My favorite part of the trip was getting away from work after 26 straight days of patient care, including three weekends in a row. DH's favorite part was the lack of crowds. I had planned this in late summer to be COVID safe, since at the time no one was sure how bad Delta would be. It was wonderful to get to spend a whole day together, roadtripping in the car and tramping through the woods.

Editor's note: You can go back and read part one of this trip to the Ohiopyle Falls here.