She Wanted to Make Her Frank Lloyd Wright House Greener. Here’s How It Went.

A homeowner spent $800,000 trying to turn her $1.1 million property into a net-zero energy home

By Fred A. Bernstein | Photographs and Video by Katrina Wittkamp for The Wall Street Journal
Feb. 13, 2024
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“I was not planning to buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house,” says Samantha Lotti. But in 2016, when she heard that the Oscar B. Balch House, one of more than two dozen Wright buildings in Oak Park, Ill., was for sale, she did go look.

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When she entered the main living space of the 1911 prairie-style house, which is named for its first owner, she says, “I fell in love.”

Within weeks, she was in contract to buy the house for $1,126,800, about 10% below asking, which, to someone who grew up in a Manhattan apartment, seemed like a bargain.

The house had a lot going for it. It is part of a gracious neighborhood of historic residences, including Wright’s own Home and Studio.

And it was in excellent condition, thanks to its previous owner, who restored much of the original building while adding a very large kitchen and great room to the back.

Lotti describes the home as “a work of art,” but it wasn’t a very energy-efficient work of art. Its 49 single-paned windows provided little insulation. Nor was there much insulation in the walls and roof.

During a “polar vortex” in 2019, Lotti, who practices Chinese medicine in Oak Park, ran the gas-fired boiler-and-radiator heating system at full blast, and still couldn’t get the indoor temperature above 55 degrees.

Air conditioning the house in summer was equally difficult. “It was so expensive,” she says. “At night I’d turn it on only if it was 90-plus degrees.”

Lotti, in one of a few discretionary changes to the house, turned an already-enclosed porch into a sauna overlooking the backyard.

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Lotti was disturbed not just as a homeowner paying the utility bills, but also as an environmentalist. So she set out  to make the Wright house green. She hoped it could even reach “net zero,” meaning it produced as much energy as it consumed.

Like most users of the phrase net zero, she didn’t count, on the consumption side, the energy that went into building and renovating the house, known as embodied energy.

Getting to net-zero would mean tightening the building envelope to reduce the need for heating and air conditioning. She began with the roof, which not only leaked when it rained but was also far from airtight.

$800,000

The sum Lotti spent attempting to get the house to net-zero, which includes engineering and site management fees and the cost of replacing a broken sewer line.

In the basement, she had to reinforce the concrete floor to hold the weight of new heating and cooling equipment.

Some of the expenses included:

Roof: About $55,000
Interior storm windows and other window and door restorations: $142,000
Heating and air conditioning improvements: About $300,000

Before the renovation, Lotti subjected the house to a blower door test, which measures the permeability of the building envelope.

She performed another one almost three years later to see if installing custom interior storm windows, insulating the second-floor ceilings and replacing the roof made the house tighter. It did, but not enough.

"We failed,” says Lotti, “but we came much closer to passing than before.” The house still leaked like a sieve, mostly through the exterior walls. But the cost of insulating those walls, she says, was “prohibitive.” As a result, she says, “The house may never be net zero.”

Installing rooftop solar panels would have helped the house meet that goal. When it was finally time to install them, workers had been in and out of the house nearly every day for three years. Lotti decided she needed a break. She still hopes to install the panels.

Marsha Shyer, who chairs the homeowner committee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, says, “Samantha is using her house as a model for environmentally conscious historic preservation. It has certainly caught the attention of the Frank Lloyd Wright homeowner community.”

Photo Editor: Kat Malott
Produced by Brian Patrick Byrne

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