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  • 21 Aug, 2019

  • By, Wikipedia

Westhope

Westhope, also known as the Richard Lloyd Jones House, is a Frank Lloyd Wright designed Textile Block home that was constructed in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1929. This was Wright's only Textile Block house outside of California. The client, Richard Lloyd Jones, was Wright's cousin and the publisher of the Tulsa Tribune.

This building is located at 3704 South Birmingham Avenue. The home has five bedrooms and five baths. It encompasses 10,405 square feet on 1.5 acres. Besides the textile blocks stacked in vertical columns, the home features 5,200 panes of glass covering almost half the exterior of the structure. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places listings in Tulsa County, Oklahoma on April 10, 1975 under National Register Criteria C, g, with an NRIS number of 75001575.

Westhope is the location of a frequently-quoted anecdote about Wright: Richard Lloyd Jones called Wright in the middle of a storm to complain that the roof was leaking on his desk, and Wright replied, "Richard, why don't you move your desk?" But Jones’ wife Georgia had an equally memorable perspective regarding the leaking structure: she said, “This is what we get for leaving a work of art out in the rain.”

Jones paid over $100,000 for construction, even though the original budget was $30,000. After Jones' death in 1963, his widow traded houses with M. Murray McCune, a Tulsa architect who updated Westhope in 1965. By mid-2017, the owner of the house was Barbara Tyson, a member of the family that founded Tyson Foods Inc. The structure was purchased by Stuart Price in October 2021, who made extensive renovations including re-waterproofing and tuckpointing cracked blocks.

The house is one of only three Wright structures in Oklahoma, the others being in Bartlesville: the Harold Price Jr. House and the 19-story Price Tower.

See also