MILLSTONE, NJ — Some say it’s a work of art — one of the many gems of the Garden State.
Designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s, the house, which sits along the Millstone River in Somerset County, features the legendary architect’s floor-to-ceiling windows that let in all the nature surrounding it.
But for the owners of the Bachman-Wilson house in Millstone Borough, there’s been a little too much Mother Nature coming in.
Any significant rain event causes the Millstone River to rise, flooding the historic home.
Hurricane Irene in 2012 was the final straw for the owners, Sharon and Lawrence Tarantino, who have decided to sell the home, but with one stipulation — the new owners must move the house, piece by piece.
The couple is looking to move the house to another part of New Jersey. If that’s not possible, they’re considering Upstate New York, the Midwest or even Italy.
If the house is moved out of New Jersey, it would leave the state with just three original Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.
“The (current) site is not sustainable,” Sharon Tarantino told The Star-Ledger of Newark. “We’ve been here for 25 years, and for 20 years we’ve dealt with flooding. It came to a point after Hurricane Irene and we determined the only way to save the house is to relocate it and build it on another site.”
Tarantino said she and her husband love their Wright house with its large windows, gleaming wood floors and remodeled kitchen. As a designer and an architect respectively, the couple has done extensive renovations to maintain Wright’s original vision for the structure. And after several floods and several renovations, the Tarantinos say they not only want to maintain that vision, but they want to keep it safe.
“This is sort of an organic happening in a way, that the house is transforming through nature,” Tarantino said. “I think (Wright) would welcome it — I think he would be really thrilled that we’re making the effort to do this to save a house, that isn’t grand in scale but grand in its spirit and design and it’s jewel that should be saved.”
Not everyone is sold on the idea of the house moving out of New Jersey.
“It’s a part of New Jersey’s heritage and it would be a great loss to our state,” said Stephanie Cherry-Farmer, senior director of programs at Preservation New Jersey, an advocacy group that placed the Bachman-Wilson home on their list of endangered historic sites in 2011. “Hopefully, they will be able to find a solution that allows the house to exist but keeps it part of New Jersey’s heritage.”
The Tarantinos are trying to do just that.
So far they’ve looked at two sites in New Jersey — one in Princeton and another in northern New Jersey, without being specific. Sharon Tarantino said the couple’s top requirement is that the site have some kind of Wright connection, and they’re also looking for a place that’s similar to where the house stands now.
“It might be a site in New Jersey, but it might not be appropriate it for the house,” she said. “So what if it’s New Jersey.”
The Tarantinos, who own Tarantino Architecture, are asking for $950,000 for house and its contents — which includes all Frank Lloyd Wright furniture — and $550,000 to deconstruct and move the house. And they plan to work closely with the new owner to reconstruct the house.
Over a dozen Frank Lloyd Wright houses are for sale across the nation, according to a Wright building conservancy group. And a few have relocated from their original location, but one expert says those moves are rarer.
“You do lose a lot when you move a Frank Lloyd Wright house from an original site to another one,” said Victor Sidy, dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Arizona. “He designed each one of his house in relation to the building site the views the sun angle, the neighbors; each house was a solved problem, and the problem was living within the constraints of the site.”
This problem, though, has gotten out of hand, the owners say.
“We feel like it’s something that has to be done because of the environment,” Sharon Tarantino said. “We have to save the house. We cannot go through another flood.”