Kentuck Knob (also known as the Hagan House) is a house in Stewart Township within Fayette County, Pennsylvania, United States. Designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the Usonian style, the residence was built for Isaac Newton "I. N." Hagan, the owner of a local ice-cream firm, along with his wife, Bernardine. It is built on the southern slope of a knoll known as Kentuck Knob, overlooking the Youghiogheny River gorge. The name of the house and knoll is derived from Little Kentuck, a hill in Fayette County named by an 18th-century settler who was planning to move to Kentucky. The house is a designated National Historic Landmark.
I. N. and Bernardine Hagan had learned of Wright's work through Edgar J. Kaufmann, a businessman who had hired Wright to design the Fallingwater house in Fayette County. The Hagans purchased of land near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in July 1953 and asked Wright to design a Usonian home for them. Despite being busy with multiple other projects, Wright agreed to design a house at Kentuck Knob, which was completed in 1956. The Hagans lived at Kentuck Knob until 1986, when they sold the property to the British nobleman Peter Palumbo, Baron Palumbo. Shortly afterward, the house was damaged by a fire, prompting the Palumbo family to renovate the house. Kentuck Knob has been open to the public for tours since 1996, and a visitor center there was completed in 2003.
The estate, accessed by a driveway from Pennsylvania State Route 2010, includes approximately 8,800 trees and a sculpture garden for the Palumbo family's art collection. The house is made of redwood and locally-quarried stone, with an overhanging copper roof and two exterior terraces. It is laid out around a hexagonal floor plan, which consists of two wings that partially surround a courtyard, converging at a hexagonal core. The interior covers and consists of seven rooms in an open plan arrangement. The kitchen, within the house's core, is surrounded by a living room to the west and a dining room to the west. Three bedrooms extend northeast of the core and are partially embedded into the hillside. The house's carport, which includes an art studio, is attached to the bedroom wing.
Site Kentuck Knob is in Stewart Township, located within Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania, United States. It is located approximately southeast of Pittsburgh. The estate was originally owned by the Hagan family and spanned ; it has been expanded over the years to more than . The estate is next to the Youghiogheny River, although the river gorge is not readily visible from the house due to the presence of trees. The building itself is on the southern slope of a hill also known as Kentuck Knob.
Geography and site usage The house is accessed via a gravel driveway leading from Pennsylvania Route 2010 (PA 2010), which is variously cited as measuring either or nearly long. It winds through some woods and passes above a waterfall called Cucumber Falls. In addition to the main house, the property includes a greenhouse, farmhouse, barn, and wooden sheds; the greenhouse was salvaged from the nearby Fallingwater house. The site had originally been farmland, but after the Hagans acquired it, they planted about 8,800 trees on the hill. These included Canadian hemlock, pin oak, shellbark hickory, sugar maple, tulip poplar, white ash, and white oak specimens. Dogwoods were also planted along the driveway, though many of these specimens later died. There are numerous boulders on the estate, which are arranged to give the appearance that they ended up there naturally, even though they were installed when the house was built. The boulders, along with ferns and evergreen plants, create a Japanese garden–like setting around the house.
After the family of the British nobleman Peter Palumbo, Baron Palumbo, acquired the house, they added a sculpture meadow, which is accessed by a winding trail that connects to the visitor center. British products are sold at the visitor center. The meadow includes works by artists such as Harry Bertoia, Scott Burton, Anthony Caro, Andy Goldsworthy, Alvar Gullichsen, Allen Jones, Phillip King, David Nash, Claes Oldenburg, Eva Reichl, George Rickey, Ray Smith, Wendy Taylor, and Michael Warren. Other pieces in the sculpture garden include two graffitied pieces of the Berlin Wall, a restroom structure, English telephone kiosks, and a pissoir. The sculptures incorporate materials like granite, steel, and wood, complementing the design of the main house. There is also a fragment of a finial, which was installed at Kentuck Knob in 2003; it had been part of the Mappin & Webb Building in London, demolished in 1994. Aside from the sculptures, the landscape retains most of its original Hagan-era design.
Surroundings The Sugarloaf Knob is southeast of the house, while the Fort Necessity National Battlefield is to the southwest. In addition, a conservation easement for Ohiopyle State Park abuts the estate. Kentuck Knob is one of four buildings in southwestern Pennsylvania designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The others are Fallingwater, a drive to the northeast, as well as Duncan House and Lindholm House at Polymath Park in Acme, Pennsylvania. Apart from Fallingwater, Kentuck Knob is the only other house in Fayette County designed by Wright.
The name originates from David Askins, a settler who wanted to move to Kentucky in the late 18th century. He ultimately instead occupied a hill in Fayette County, which he called Little Kentuck. The Askins site, formed through the merger of the Mitchell, Morris, and Thorpe families' farms, later became Stewart Township's Kentuck District. Because the area is mountainous, it has remained largely undeveloped over the years. Just before the Hagan family bought the site, it was occupied by two Eastern European immigrants, Donath and Anna Peles, who had lived there since World War I.
History
Development The house on Kentuck Knob was developed for the Hagan family, who owned a major dairy company in Western Pennsylvania (Hagan Ice Cream, later acquired by Crowley Foods). The family then lived in an undistinguished brick house in Uniontown, Pennsylvania; they collected textiles and pottery, which they felt did not fit the style of their Uniontown house. Isaac Newton "I. N." Hagan and his wife Bernardine were acquainted with the family of Edgar J. Kaufmann, who built the nearby Fallingwater in the late 1930s. Kaufmann had first met I. N. Hagan several years before Kentuck Knob's construction, when he asked Hagan whether he could bottle local farmers' milk. The Hagans learned about Wright's work through the Kaufmanns, whom they sometimes visited. After multiple trips to Fallingwater, Bernardine came to regard it as "a very beautiful, unusual place", while I. N. said that he had become more attracted to Fallingwater on each successive visit. As I. N. later said, "My wife and I have always had our hearts set on living on a Wright home." Their son Paul, an aspiring architect, had also taken an interest in Fallingwater's design.
Site acquisition and Wright commission The Hagans bought a tract in the mountains south of Uniontown in July 1953, where they wanted Wright to design a house. They commissioned the broker Herman Keys to buy the tract on their behalf for $9,000, and Keys immediately resold the tract to the Hagans for a nominal fee of $1. The seller was the Peles family, who retained ownership of a farmhouse and several outbuildings next to the road. The Peles family continued to farm on another tract they owned. At the time, few people in Uniontown lived in the mountains because it was stigmatized, but the Hagans wanted to "partially remove" themselves from Uniontown's more urban character. The growing popularity of the automobile, in any case, meant that they could easily drive to Uniontown.
I. N. reached out to Kaufmann, who advised the Hagans to call Wright, not write to him, to ask whether he would design them a house. In August 1953, the Hagans brought Paul and his friend James Baker to Fallingwater just before Paul's wedding. The same day, I. N. wrote a letter asking Wright to design them a home. Wright took his time responding, even though, according to the scholar Donald Hoffmann, the Hagans' mountainside site "should have immediately appealed to him". The Hagans called Wright, who invited them to his Taliesin studio in Wisconsin. During their visit to Taliesin later in August, the family requested a one-story stone-and-wood structure with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Wright claimed he "could shake a design out of my sleeve" and asked the Hagans about their hobbies and what they wanted in a house. He also asked the Hagans if they were "nesters or perchers" to decide whether to put the house beside or atop the hill, ultimately opting for a site on the hill's southern slope.
When the family returned to Pennsylvania, they toured the Richard C. Smith House, Unitarian Meeting House, and Jacobs First House, all designed by Wright. These influenced the final design of Kentuck Knob; the Smith House and Meeting House were both arranged on a grid with 60-degree angles, and the Hagans liked the Meeting House's copper roof and the Smith House's dentils and trellises. The Hagans also traveled to New York City to see an exhibit about a Usonian house. I. N. described the site in a letter to Wright that September, saying that the peak of the knoll "probably presents a pretty discouraging picture". The Hagans returned to Fallingwater after Kaufmann offered to give the family stones from a quarry on his property. In November 1953, Wright's secretary Eugene Masselink wrote to the Hagans, saying that design work would soon begin. By then, the Hagans were considering a house with a board-and-batten facade and a flat roof, rather than the stone structure Wright envisioned.
Design At the time he took the commission, Wright was 86 years old and was simultaneously designing structures such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Beth Sholom Synagogue in the Philadelphia metropolitan area of Pennsylvania, and the Price Tower in Oklahoma. Accordingly, Wright delegated many of his other projects to apprentices. John H. Howe, Wright's chief draftsman and longtime apprentice, drew the plans for the house. The initial plans were completed in February 1954 and included a drawing of the site with boulders scattered throughout. The plans called for a glass-walled structure with two wings radiating from a core, enclosing a central entrance court. Since Howe had not visited the site, the early drawings were riddled with errors; for example, the house was oriented the wrong way, and the drawings misrepresented the topography. Wright also did not visit the site until the design was completed, instead relying on contour maps.
The Hagans soon requested changes to the plan, saying that some design features, such as the living room and kitchen, were too small for their needs. Though Wright was known to be generally irascible and resistant to change, he readily agreed to the Hagans' requests. He lengthened the living room, relocated the living-room windows away from the house's terrace, moved the basement stair, and added a painting studio for Bernardine. Wright modified the kitchen's floors and countertops and added a screen to the kitchen, and he expanded the dining room upon learning that the Hagans did not frequently eat out. The main facade, which originally faced in a more southerly direction, was rotated about 15 degrees clockwise. He overruled some of the Hagans' other requests, such as insulated glass panes (which he felt unnecessary) and a wider hallway, and he overruled the Hagans' preferences for a smaller terrace.