Scaffolding is up and renovations are under way on Fallingwater, the renowned work by Frank Lloyd Wright in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands. Photo / Quinn Glabicki, The Washington Post
Home renovations can be a headache. But when your home is a Unesco World Heritage site that receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a year and (small caveat) was built atop a waterfall, renovations are more like a migraine: protracted and high-pressure.
For the past two years, staff at Fallingwater, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s many-terraced masterpiece in the woods of Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands, have found themselves in the middle of a home improvement project on steroids. They are overseeing a US$7 million ($12m) renovation to replace and restore roofs, flashing, window and door frames and exterior walls.
And they’re doing all of it while hewing to strict historic preservation standards and managing the expectations of visitors who flock from around the world to see one of the most iconic buildings of the 20th century.
The renovation is routine and also very necessary, says Fallingwater director Justin Gunther, “to eliminate water infiltration challenges”. In other words: Fallingwater was leaking.
Not that anyone was surprised. The homes of the legendary architect, who pushed the limits of design and technology, are well-known for their drip, drip, drips, even when they aren’t perched on water features.
“In the Wright community we describe our houses by how many buckets it requires to capture all the leaks,” Gunther says. “We’re hoping to get to no buckets.”
Edgar J. Kaufmann snr, the owner of a large department store in nearby Pittsburgh, commissioned Fallingwater, which was designed and constructed in the late 1930s. While the Kaufmanns enjoyed their summer home – famously cantilevered over a 30-foot waterfall – for more than three decades before turning it over to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the family noticed problems with the house from the start.
“Edgar jnr documented leaks before they moved in,” says Jamie Hudson, preservation project manager at Fallingwater. “So, it’s always been a problem.”
Particularly problematic are the flat roofs and terraces that make Fallingwater so indelible – and provide the perfect place for water to pool. “In southwestern Pennsylvania, that was probably a bad idea to begin with, because we get so much rain and snow,” Gunther says. “But Wright often joked his buildings were like leaving fine art out in the rain.”
Ironically, the “water” in Fallingwater’s name – the creek and waterfall below – is not the source of moisture infiltration. Instead, water has got into the house in other ways: seeping in around window and door frames and through voids in the stone masonry walls, which were filled with rubble during construction that has settled over the last century.
Like many home owners, staff at Fallingwater have been doing spot repairs since the last major waterproofing and reroofing was completed more than two decades ago. “Little Band-Aids,” Hudson calls them.
By 2023, it was time for full-blown surgery.
In addition to replacing every one of Fallingwater’s roofs and repairing and repainting each steel window and door frame, renovation crews also have been busy injecting grout into the home’s exterior stone masonry walls. In total, nearly 12 tonnes of grout have been pumped into the famous ocher walls to fill existing voids.
Hudson says staff looked for contractors with experience in historic preservation to perform the work, and they prioritised local firms whenever possible. “There is a precedent for that because that’s who built the house,” she says.
Completed in 1939, Fallingwater, its guesthouse and its service quarters were built almost entirely by local craftsmen using materials quarried on-site. Some of those workers were still around when senior maintenance specialist Ben Morrison, who grew up and still lives just four miles away, started working at Fallingwater in 2002.
“They had built barns and houses and you name it, and they brought those skills here,” says Morrison, who typically “does a little bit of everything” in his role at Fallingwater, including cutting grass and laying stone, and has had a hand in many of the recent renovations.
Morrison and his team of contractors face a lot of the same challenges the original builders did almost 100 years ago, including the hilly terrain and moody weather. During winter, mist from the falls coats everything – including scaffolding – in a dangerous skin of ice.
But 2025 also presents new difficulties. For one thing, the stream that rushes below the house is now a state-protected waterway, meaning workers must be extra vigilant about where building materials wind up.
“When you’re working on Fallingwater, you can’t drop anything,” Morrison says. “Not a nail, not a drill bit, not anything.”
The home is a fragile ecosystem too, full of furniture that Wright designed and paintings by artists including Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera. Those objects don’t mix well with power tools. Morrison says that every morning he even tucks “the 9000 keys” he typically wears on a belt into his back pocket, where they can’t accidentally scratch the house’s delicate woodwork.
Fallingwater’s distinction as a Unesco World Heritage site, as well as its spot on the US National Register of Historic Places, also means that workers must proceed much slower and with more caution than they would during an ordinary project.
“You can’t do things half at Fallingwater,” Morrison says. “What would normally take you an hour to do at home, you can’t do it like that here.” But treating the home like fine china, he says, “isn’t a burden; it’s second nature”.
Multiple architectural experts, as well as the state’s historic preservation office, vetted the renovation plans. And while the project has incorporated modern technology that would have been foreign to Wright – gas-powered generators, ground-penetrating radar and liquid grout injection, for example – his vision remains the team’s North Star.
“We always honour the original design of the architect,” Gunther says.
On a Tuesday in July, a dozen or so visitors ambled between Fallingwater’s main living room and its terrace, museum-tour headsets dangling from their ears, appearing more intrigued than irritated by the tower of scaffolding and tarps that rose above them. In the second-floor dressing room, some stole glances on to the west terrace, which was covered in plywood and scattered with paint buckets.
“People like to see you work,” Morrison says. “Most of the visitors like to see what you’re doing, how you’re fixing things, how you’re trying to save it from decay.”
Fallingwater receives about 140,000 visitors a year, and during the renovation, staff have worked to temper their expectations.
“We always try to be as forthright as possible, with website advisories and a live cam,” says Clinton Piper, senior administrator of special projects. The site also has offered special preservation tours for visitors who want to peek behind the scaffolding to see the work in progress. “These are moments that aren’t likely to happen again; we say take advantage of them.”
Renovations are scheduled to be completed by spring of 2026, just in time for the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the home’s construction.
“I think we’ll all be relieved to get back to normality,” Piper says. “It’s always nice to see everything put back together.”
For Morrison, the end of the renovation will be bittersweet.
“We’ve got to know all the contractors, and it will be sad to see those guys go,” he says. “Still, it will be nice to take a breath, and for the visitors to walk down the hill and see the house complete.”
But like anyone who’s cared for a home across decades, Morrison knows the job is never really finished.
“We’ll still have plenty of work to do.”