I was lucky enough to tag along on a tour organized by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy on Saturday. Several of the tour participants own Frank Lloyd Wright homes; one couple I met owns in Highland Park and the other, in Los Angeles.

There was one Wright on this tour in NW Indiana; the other homes and buildings were Wright- or midcentury-inspired (watch this space for more on those later).

Built as a Wright-designed Usonian house in 1939, the Armstrong House in in Ogden Dunes has been sensitively expanded over the years by a Wrightian architect (John Howe of Taliesin Associated Architects) in the early 1960s and 1970s.

Usonian homes were designed to be simple and affordable; characteristics this home shared include a concrete slab, red chimney and utility core, board-and-batten cypress walls and a flat roof.

The house is unique, however, in that Wright “shifted the angle of the house’s four-foot-square planning grid on the second level by 30 degrees,” writes John H. Waters of the Conservancy. “This allows the plan to more closely follow the rise of the dune on which the second level was constructed.” The result is a home that looks completely at home in its environment.

John and Patricia Peterson, who bought the Armstrong House in 1958, found the concrete floors and cypress walls in bad repair; they carpeted the floors and replaced the cypress with mahogany from the Phillipines.

The Petersons had the home until they sold it to its current owners in 2021.

Correction: This story has been changed to reflect the date it was designed: 1939.