Kentuck Knob

In the early 1950s I.N. and Bernardine Hagan, who ran a successful dairy and ice cream business in the region, admired their friends' new Wright house at Fallingwater and asked the architect, then in his eighties, to design a home for them on a nearby hilltop known as Kentuck Knob. Wright agreed and produced one of his Usonian houses, his term for the moderately sized, efficient homes he designed for middle-class American families. He famously said he could shake the design out of his sleeve, but the result was a subtle and carefully sited house, tucked just below the crown of the hill so it never breaks the horizon, built of stone quarried on the property and warm red cypress. The Hagans lived in it for decades, and it remains furnished with much of their belongings, giving it a lived-in intimacy that many Wright houses lack. In the 1980s the house was bought by Peter Palumbo, an English lord and collector, who preserved it and opened it to the public while assembling a sculpture collection in the surrounding meadow.

Kentuck Knob is now open for tours, a companion piece to nearby Fallingwater and a chance to see a smaller, more personal side of Wright's genius.

The defining feature of Kentuck Knob is its geometry. Wright laid it out on a module of hexagons rather than squares, so the walls meet at open, obtuse angles and the rooms flow into one another without sharp corners. The effect is soft and organic, more like a natural formation than a built structure, and it gives even small spaces a sense of ease and flow.

The materials reinforce that feeling. Rough native fieldstone walls anchor the house to its hill, while warm cypress wood lines the ceilings and built-in furniture, and broad bands of glass open the living spaces to the terrace and the view. Like all of Wright's best work, the house is designed to belong to its site, low and quiet against the hilltop rather than imposed upon it.

Beyond the house, the hilltop meadow holds an open-air collection of modern and contemporary sculpture assembled by the Palumbo family, works set among the grass and trees to be discovered on a walk. Among them stands a genuine section of the Berlin Wall, a piece of twentieth-century history set incongruously into a Pennsylvania meadow, along with pieces by noted modern artists.

The surrounding Laurel Highlands are a landscape of forested ridges and rivers that was long the homeland of Native peoples, including the Lenape, Shawnee, and Haudenosaunee nations, before displacement in the colonial and early national eras. None are federally recognized in Pennsylvania today, and descendant nations continue elsewhere. The long views west from the house terrace look out over that older mountain country.

Spring greens the hilltop and the surrounding woods, an easygoing time to tour the house and walk the sculpture meadow before the summer crowds. Summer is the busiest, cool on the breezy hilltop, and the best season for pairing a visit with nearby Fallingwater and the rivers of the Laurel Highlands.

Autumn is the standout, when the hardwood ridges around the house blaze with color and the long views west turn spectacular, a favorite of photographers. Winter is quiet and stark, the house and sculptures set against bare trees and snow, and the site runs a reduced schedule, so it pays to check ahead before a cold-season visit.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.