“This glass embedded in the mortar was unknown to us; there was no notation on the drawings whatsoever,” Borcherding says. “It started at the ceiling and moved down the mortar joints until it hits the stone band in the bank building. The brick below that stone band had been removed in the ’30s when they put all the plate glass windows in for retail display. We asked ourselves, ‘Would Wright have had glass go all the way down to the floor?’.”
The team consulted Wright experts and everyone concluded Wright wouldn’t have taken the embedded glass any lower than where it currently appeared. “The sunlight that comes in from the ballroom’s clerestory windows hits this reflective glass in the columns and it just has this sparkle and shimmer,” Borcherding says. “It’s an iridescent glass, so it changes color during the day as the sunlight comes through the clerestory windows, but the light never hits the bricks below that stone band so there wouldn’t be a need for embedded glass in the mortar there.”
In addition, Marinos likes to say finding and acquiring the building’s missing elements was more than a little “serendipitous.” “There’s quite a list of things that would just showed up and we had so many people who were willing to donate things back to us,” Marinos says. “The 25 beautiful art glass panels in the skylight room were found in the ceiling of a doctor’s home in the Rock Crest-Rock Glen area. The doctor and his wife donated those to the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy and the conservancy donated them to us when the building was finished. Those panels are worth probably $700,000 to $800,000!”
[Editor’s Note: The Rock Crest-Rock Glen Historic District in Mason City contains the largest collection of Prairie School-style houses in the world. One home in the district— the Stockman House—actually was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.]
“We had a couple pieces of glass come back from Des Moines that somebody’s relative had salvaged from the Dumpster when they were thrown out,” Borcherding adds. “The clerestory windows of the bank/ballroom had iron grilles on them in the original design but only a handful of them remained. The rest of them had been removed in the ’30s when the bank was severely altered. A good portion of those grilles made it to Clear Lake, which is just 8 miles to the west. They had become a fence on somebody’s lake-shore property. Thankfully, the owner was willing to donate them to the project.”
Modern Amenities
Despite its mission to recreate Wright’s design, the team was challenged to ensure the historic spaces still met the expectations of 21st-century guests. For example, the original corridors were wood flooring. To minimize noise, the design team received approval from the preservation board and park service to lay wall-to-wall carpet over the wood. To maintain historical accuracy, Borcherding and his colleague Dana Thomas, IIDA, opted to use a wool-blend carpet. [Editor’s Note: In an odd coincidence, Wright designed the 1902 Dana-Thomas House, which stands in Springfield, Ill.]
“Probably two years before the project was completed, Dana and I were working on all the custom patterns for the carpet in the corridors and ballroom,” Borcherding recalls. “We started taking motifs that Wright used in the building and manipulating those a little into the patterns that we used in different areas. The carpet has performed fantastically, as far as wear and cleanability. The unfortunate part was that there was no manufacturer in the United States for wool-blend carpet.”
In fact, the carpet was woven in Egypt and narrowly escaped the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 in which millions of protestors demanded the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak. Although the carpet made it out of Egypt days before the revolution began, the ship on which it was being transported broke down. In a stroke of luck, the ship was able to limp to shore, avoiding yet another delay for the carpet installation.
To further meet the desires of modern travelers, the 43 original 10- by 10-foot guestrooms have been transformed into 21 rooms in the hotel with six additional guestrooms above the former bank, now the ballroom. Offices previously were located in this space. Each room features bathroom radiant-floor heating, WiFi access and smart controls to operate the lighting.
“There are 27 unique rooms in the hotel,” Borcherding says. “They’re all fitted out the same way but their shapes are different. Wright on the Park along with the hotel operator decided very early on that we would have one historic suite, which is set up the way Wright had designed it. It’s a 10- by 10-foot guestroom and then another 10 by 10 guestroom with a small area in between that has the commode and an original claw-foot bathtub.”
3 Comments
This hotel is amazing as it has been for a long time which makes it more interesting to visit and explore.
Iowa Public Television showed the wonderful documentary about the process: THE LAST WRIGHT https://www.academicvideostore.com/video/last-wright-frank-lloyd-wright-and-rebirth-american-city
I born & raised in Mason City and remember the Park Inn building in good shape and then watched it’s decline.
My wife & I have stayed at The Park Inn about five or six times and I am truly in love with that building. What a great idea to renovate the building and put it to good use. Too many old buildings today are being torn down, I believe, unnecessarily. This is a great article describing a grand old building and the endless hours put into restoring it.