This past weekend we attended the AHDI-NEMI conference in Morgantown, WV. AHDI stands for Association for Healthcare Documentation and NEMA is our regional district, New England Middle Atlantic. Morgantown is about a 6.5 hour drive from Binghamton and was coincidentally the same route we travelled last month for cousins weekend, only about an hour farther. Therefore, it was a familiar drive through the beautiful Endless, Laurel and Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. The drive started out in rain, but then the rain stopped and we had a pretty nice drive seeing all the amazing fall colors. It truly has been a spectacular fall foliage season.
The conference was held at the Lakeview Golf Resort and Spa near Morgantown. I won’t go into any detail about the conference other than to say that it was fun seeing many familiar faces, listening to some interesting presentations,having fun hanging out with attendees, and also having some down time for resting. Christine came away with at least one good prospect for TQAudit, which is always a good thing. You can see photos of the conference on Christine’s Facebook page if you’re interested.
During cousin’s weekend last month, Christine, my brother Grant, and I visited Fallingwater, one of the most famous, and iconic, Frank Lloyd Wright homes. We loved that tour (see my previous post). Christine, a voracious literature gatherer on trips, learned that near Fallingwater, just 4 miles away, there was another Frank Lloyd Wright home called Kentuck Knob. In that we were returning home from Morgantown and driving in that general direction, Christine reserved house tour tickets for Kentuck Knob.
Kentuck Knob got its name from a western Pennsylvania settler who wanted to relocate to Kentucky. He reconsidered and stayed on a tract of land that he called Little Kentucky. Eventually, the “y” got lost and it became Kentuck. Because the land was on a rounded hill, knob is the word used to describe it. Thus, Kentuck Knob.
A successful dairy company family, the Hagans (most famous for Hagan’s ice cream) bought 89 acres of the mountainous land in the early 1950s. The Hagans were friends with the Kaufmann family, owners of Fallingwater. The Hagans frequently visited Fallingwater and asked Mr. Kaufmann whether he thought Frank Lloyd Wright would design a house for them on Kentuck Knob. In 1953 Wright was very busy at the time designing the Guggenheim Museum, a synagogue, and 12 other homes. Wright was 86 at the time! He did say yes to the project, but he only paid one very short visit to the site during construction. He designed the house from topographical maps and photos. The house was completed in 1956. The Hagans invited Wright to visit the completed house, but Wright refused saying that he already knew what it looked like so he didn’t need to see it.
The style of the house is called Usonian, which Wright coined. Some say the word Usonian is something of an abbreviation for United States of North America, which during the Depression years, Wright wanted to make housing more affordable. Usonian design was rather like the first modular housing. The design featured small, one-story structures set on concrete slabs with piping for radiant heat beneath. The kitchens were incorporated into the living areas. Open car ports took the place of garages.
What is great about the Hagan House is that it is nestled into the side of the hillside allowing the building to grow out of rather than dominate its setting. The house is oriented to the south and west for optimal solar exposure. Apparently, when the house was built, there were no trees around the property as it had been cleared for grazing and farmland, and so over the 30 years they owned the property, the Hagans planted thousands of seedlings, which now have grown into large trees that surround the house and property and provide a fantastic woodland shade and beauty.
The materials used for the house include the abundant local sandstone and weather-resistant tidewater red cedar. The woodworking detail was just amazing. All around the house were clerestory windows in a beautiful pattern.
And what I was fascinated by was the fantastic dentil molding all around the house. We learned that all of it was hand-cut in a hexagonal pattern that mimicked the hexagonal shape of the entire house. It apparently took 2 years for all the dentil molding to be hand-cut in the tidewater red cedar. Wow!
The house has two wings – the public space and the private space. In the public space is the great room and dining room. The bedrooms (3) and bathrooms (2) are in the private wing. Both wings extend from a hexagonal center core which forms the huge fireplace. And the kitchen was behind the big fireplace between the two wings.
The great room seemed fairly typical of the Wright style with built-in seating and large windows looking out to the cantilevered porch. There was one really cool feature at the end of the great room. There was a huge stone planter, half inside and half outside that had a big window above it. You could not immediately tell there was a window there. It was so perfectly placed and just a beautiful view bringing the outside in. Photos weren’t allowed inside the house, but there was a photo in the Kentuck Knob booklet showing this planter and window.
The dining room was a wonderful space right inside the large windows to the porch. There were lots of built in cupboards and the dining table was kind of modular so it could be enlarged and even taken outside. Here’s another photo from the booklet showing the dining room.
The porch runs the entire length of the public space of the house. It is cantilevered and the roof has wonderful hexagonal cut outs the entire length. The tour guide said it was really interesting to track the sun movement from the sun coming in through the ceiling cut outs casting hexagonal sunspots on the porch floor. And all the cut outs and along the entire length of the porch was the hand-cut dentil molding. Really beautiful!
(Photo of photo from booklet)
As I mentioned, the Hagans were frequent visitors to Fallingwater. Mrs. Hagan wanted in her home the sound of water so she had build a little water feature right outside her bedroom window so she could have her own falling water.
Here are several photos from around the property showing various features. The sandstone is quite overbearing from some views. I said that the house looks rather like a gunnery turret in places. And at the end of the porch from down below in the yard, it is described as the prow of a great ship. Wright didn’t like right angles and so we learned that there are only 2 right angles in the whole place – both in a bathroom due to plumbing reasons.
After the tour of the house we could explore the grounds. We walked out to a wonderful overlook of the Youghiogheny River valley. It was a really beautiful vista.
The Hagans lived in the Kentuck Knob house for nearly 30 years. In 1986 Lord Palumbo of London, UK bought the property for $600,000 as a vacation home. Since 1996, the Palumbo family has balanced their occupancy with a public tour program, a method of historic property management more common to their native Britain than to the United States. So the property remains a private residence but a private corporation runs the property. The Palumbos added a sculpture meadow to the site near the base of the mountain. So, in addition to the house tour, one can stroll through the woods down the mountain and into the meadow sculpture garden.
So we greatly enjoyed our time at Kentuck Knob. Visiting Fallingwater a few weeks ago was a fantastic experience. Kentuck Knob didn’t have the “wow” appeal, but nonetheless, it is well worth the to visit. Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs are very interesting and one gets such a wonderful balance of nature with living space. Christine and I are fascinated by Wright and his work. Hopefully we’ll get to tour many other works by this renowned architect.
As we started to head home, we came to Ohioplye State Park and the Youghiogheny River. All this is within very large tracts of state game land and forests and is a huge recreational area with lots of campground and hiking trails. I ran over to the river to take a couple of photos. It was pretty at the Ohioplye park.
And so we headed home. Fortunately, we only had a few spits of rain. The sky was ominous-looking in some areas, but then the clouds would break and we got some sun and blue sky. The peak fall foliage colors were past, but it was still a nice drive. We mixed it up with highways and country roads, which we enjoyed.
So our Morgantown trip was very nice. We had a great time combining business with pleasure.
(So I don’t get in trouble for using photos from the booklet, I’ll mention that the booklet is titled Kentuck Knob, designed by Martha Waskik Graphic Arts Inc., with photos by Jim Judkis, Tom Little, and Robert Ruschak. I did not see a copyright in this booklet, so I hope this citation is sufficient.)