You can sleep in two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Western Pa.’s Polymath Park

The only disappointing thing about visiting architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Fallingwater home in Western Pennsylvania is that you can’t stay there.

If Fallingwater did offer overnights, it would likely be booked out for eternity, but aficionados don’t have to go very far to sleep in a house Wright designed. Polymath Park, just 28 miles north of Fallingwater in Acme, Westmoreland County, offers two Wright houses, Duncan and Mäntylä, for overnights, and two homes designed by one of his apprentices, Peter Berndtson.

Berndtson built his two Polymath Park homes — Balter and Blum — in the 1960s for two Pittsburgh-area families who’d purchased 130 acres of farmland. The families used the homes for 30 years. In 2003, Thomas and Heather Papinchak purchased Polymath Park, and a few years later, were able to move Wright’s Duncan house there.

“It was dismantled piece-by-piece and shipped in storage containers,” Heather said on a tour earlier this year.

The Papinchaks, who run a unique, tree-house-style restaurant on the property called Treetops, started hosting overnights in 2007. In 2016, they purchased Wright’s Mäntylä house in Minnesota and relocated it to Polymath Park.

Each of the Polymath Park homes is unique.

The two Wright homes offer his signature angles and attention to built-in features like bookshelves and couches, and small “toadstool” seats. His fireplaces are enormous, but Polymath doesn’t allow fires in Wright’s homes.

There is almost nothing hanging on the walls in the Wright homes.

“For Wright, the art was the house,” said Robert Hoffer, who does public relations for Polymath Park.

Berndtson’s Balter home is shadowy and cool, with low-slung roofs and a tree house feel that blends into the surrounding forest. His Blum house is all windows, with a high-definition view of the rolling landscape beyond it.

“This one was built all for the view,” said Hoffer. “On a hot summer night, when there’s a thunderstorm rolling across this valley, you don’t need television.”

In McKean County, by the New York border, guests can also spend the night at Lynn Hall, a Wright-inspired home on Route 6. The home was built by Walter J. Hall, who worked on Fallingwater, and has two units available for overnights.

Fallingwater, Wright’s 1936 masterpiece, was deemed the “best all-time work of American architecture” in a poll of members of the American Institute of Architects. Since it opened for tours in 1964, the home atop a waterfall has brought 6.3 million visitors to rural Fayette County, including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Tom Hanks.

Hoffer said Will Ferrell stayed at Polymath Park and ate dinner at Treetops.

Finally, since you’re already in Western Pennsylvania, Wright’s stunning stone house Kentuck Knob is open for tours, just six miles south of Fallingwater in Fayette County.

At Polymath Park, overnights for Berndtson’s Balter and Blum homes are $475, while Wright’s Duncan and Mäntylä are $675 and $825 per night. All four houses have a four-person maximum.

Polymath Park also offers tours.