Massaro House

Massaro House is a private island residence inspired by designs of a never-constructed project conceived by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and is named for its owner, Joseph Massaro. It is located on the privately owned Petre Island (sometimes spelled Petra Island) in Lake Mahopac, New York,The original plansIn 1949, architect Frank Lloyd Wright received a commission from an engineer named A. K. Chahroudi to build a house on the 10acre Petre Island, which Chahroudi owned. Chahroudi would later state that during a lunch meeting he had with Wright and Edgar Kaufmann, the owner of Wright’s celebrated Fallingwater, the architect told Kaufmann: "When I finish the house on the island, it will surpass your Fallingwater".Wright worked on designing a one-story, 5000sqft house for three months, but the project was cancelled when Chahroudi realized he was not able to afford the $50,000 budget that Wright envisioned for the project, nor a second more modest version requested of Wright. Instead, Wright designed a 1200sqft cottage for Chahroudi for the island.ConstructionIn 1996, Petre Island was purchased for $700,000 USD by Joseph Massaro, a sheet metal contractor. Though he had seen the original Wright drawings for the main home years earlier, he initially intended merely to restore the island’s guest cottage. Massaro received those renderings as part of the purchase of the island. Massaro sold his sheet metal business in 2000 to focus on the creation of the house, the construction phase of which took place between 2003 and 2007.