TOP VIEW   A home’s architectural pedigree and the accomplishments of its inhabitants may elevate a residence to a legacy worthy of preservation. But families who embrace the notion that transforming a home into a public legacy is easy may be unpleasantly surprised. Negotiations with the community and financial sponsors can be long and complex. A significant endowment must be established for long-term upkeep. The owner must also convince heirs, or find a sponsoring institution or government agency, to oversee the home and the endowment in perpetuity.  Photography by Sue Root Baker

Clifton worked alongside her husband while he chaired the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Their activism drew various threats from the community, and some locals pulled their money out of the bank, Van recalls. “My dad said his great-grandfather and grandfather never took Confederate money, and he didn’t need it either,” he explains.

SPRING HOUSE, a Frank Lloyd Wright hemicycle in Tallahassee, Fla., was commissioned by George and Clifton Lewis in the 1950s. Photography by Sue Root Baker

To commemorate the two legacies that Spring House represents—the family’s politics and Wright’s design—the Lewises founded a Florida not-for-profit corporation in 1996, the Spring House Institute, designed to turn the house into an educational facility. The house has since been the site of a few seminars focused on the environment, the arts and human rights.

Susan Olsen, a former member of the board of directors of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and a past director of the Wright-designed Pope-Leighey House in Alexandria, Va., describes the Lewises as free spirited and public spirited. But the preservation of a legacy home demands much more than goodwill. Owners must set aside enough assets to provide funds that will grow long into the future, and they must possess the ambassadorial acumen to marshal a core of passionate community leaders or family members to maintain the house.

Spring House could easily require an endowment of about $5 million, similar to the figure required by the famous Farnsworth House (see “From Eyesore to Icon,” page 88) in Plano, Ill., says Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, a Chicago-based preservation group. Indeed, Spring House poses especially thorny maintenance issues. It is built partly of wood, which needs special treatment to withstand Florida’s hot and humid climate. Even now the house is in need of roofing improvements and other repairs.

Unfortunately, the Lewis family’s fortune has dwindled since the days of the Lewis State Bank. “In recent years,” Van says, “we haven’t been much on capitalism or capital—too interested in trying to save the world.” Although the institute has gained nonprofit status, it has not yet attracted substantial gifts.

YALE TURNED down the Gruber gift, however, because the university could not afford to maintain the property. Photography by Tsar Fedorsky

Scherubel advises owners of historic properties to proceed cautiously when deciding whether to convert them from private to public use. Prior to investing any substantial capital, they should create a feasibility study—as they would with any entrepreneurial venture—detailing what public uses might be effective in supplementing the endowment to maintain the house.

Scherubel recommends hiring a consultant conversant with the unique use issues of historic properties; in some cases, grants are available to the owner to fund these complex studies. Preservation organizations, such as the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, try to help families find funding to supplement an endowment.

At the same time, the conservancy supports the guidelines promulgated by the Secretary of the Interior for historic properties, which stress that the best use for any historic property is its originally intended use. Should the Lewis family decide to sell Spring House—a question under consideration—the conservancy suggests that the transfer to a new owner be made conditional on the acceptance of a preservation easement, recorded with the deed to the property. Such an easement constitutes a binding agreement between the owner of a particular piece of property and a qualified preservation organization; it stipulates that the structure cannot be razed and must be maintained in its historic condition and character in perpetuity.

May Gruber, who at 93 remains an active arts patron and philanthropist in the old mill town of Manchester, N.H., has worked hard to turn her home into a public legacy as a music school. The house has long been a showcase for the cultural interests of May and her second husband, Sam Gruber, who died in 1996.

The house had been built in the 1980s for a New Hampshire state senator, Alice Tirrell Knight. The residence was not the work of a famous architect, but it was nestled in a spectacular forest on 101¼2 acres in Goffstown, a village just outside Manchester. Sam envisaged chamber music concerts in the living room; with its cathedral ceiling and second-story balcony, the venue was ideal for fund-raisers for the Manchester Community Music School and a youth orchestra school the Grubers founded.

To adapt the house to serve both as a family abode and a public space, the couple hired architect Carl Goedecke, who grew up in Manchester. Goedecke says he was impressed with the location of the house and took his design cues from the grandeur of the setting. His plan relied on multiple sets of interconnected French doors set between rooms. To host concerts, May set aside the comfortable furnishings of the living room, family room, dining room and library and had rows of folding auditorium chairs (borrowed from a local undertaker) set up for guests.

Over the years, the concerts at the home have attracted a wide audience: friends, musicians and participants in Sam’s summer camps for amateur musicians. By holding the performances in their home rather than in a local concert hall, the Grubers hoped to make concertgoing fashionable while exposing the audiences to their museum-quality art collection.

In recent years, May has begun thinking about creating a lasting musical legacy with her Goffstown property, which includes two more houses the couple had acquired along the same road. She offered to donate all three houses, plus three others she was willing to build on her acreage, to Yale for a summer music school that would draw tourists, similar to the visitors that Peterborough, N.H., has for its MacDowell Colony for artists.

Yale turned down the Gruber gift, however, because the university could not afford the maintenance on the property, and the endowment that would have been required to keep up the home and land was beyond May’s ability to provide. The New England Conservatory and the Longy School of Music also rejected the offer for similar reasons.

Preservation specialists say this is common. According to Arnold Berke, executive editor of Preservation, published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the trust welcomes home donations, but they require substantial endowments attached to them for maintenance. These endowments, Berke points out, tend to be more than most people think.

Despite Goedecke’s deft architectural intervention, the Gruber house does not express an architect’s vision of a historically significant aesthetic. It does not qualify for the National Register as the down-at-the heels but architecturally important Spring House does. The Gruber legacy is founded in what the inhabitants have given to the community. So if a university were to ultimately accept the property, there would be nothing to prevent the conversion of the houses to office space or razing them to build something else, such as a retreat. If an inadequate maintenance endowment accompanies a gift of this nature, such an outcome is not unlikely.

Even in cases in which an endowment is adequate, the move from private to public raises issues. Consider the evolution of Duke Farms in Hillsborough, N.J., a home of Doris Duke, who died in 1993. The estate features a foundation for a grand house that was never built. While alive, Duke would not permit trees or shrubbery growing in the abandoned basement to be cut, and family retainers found it painful to contemplate any pruning.

According to Duke Farms executive director Tim Taylor, his staff has carefully removed about half of the trees and shrubs growing inside the foundation, trimming the minimum necessary to give tourists an unimpeded view. “This pruning was the crossover moment,” Taylor says, “when we truly moved from a private estate to a public venue.” In doing so, he cautiously, though necessarily, gave the spirit of Duke’s will priority over her wishes during her lifetime.

The Frank Lloyd Wright house of the Lewis family has this in common with the grand house at Duke Farms: neither is fully complete. An exterior wall girdling a circular terrace is unfinished at Spring House; Clifton wants to complete it as part of a conversion plan. She talks about constructing another house on her land, a simple bamboo and gunite structure that architect Leonardo Ricci has already designed; it would house 10 people in a communal, intergenerational housing scheme. Potential buyers have materialized who would allow Lewis to remain in the Wright house until her death, but none would support this project, designed to allow her to remain in the new house. So far,  Van says, “The outside world has not cooperated with my mother’s dreams. That hasn’t slowed her down, though. I’m proud of her.” 

Patricia Eakins is a novelist and author of Writing for Interior Design.