You Can Now STay in a Frank Lloyd Wright-Designed Airbnb for Less Than a Hotel

Pros: wifi, cable TV, "cooked breakfast." Cons: trundle bed.

October 19, 2016 9:00 am EDT

You can get all kinds of houses on Airbnb in the neighborhood of $150 a night, from a bedroom in SoHo to a five-bedroom mountain villa in Transylvania. Add to the list: an actual Frank Lloyd Wright space on Crystal Lake in Virginia Beach.

We said “space” instead of “house” for a reason: The 3,000-square-foot Cooke House, designed in 1953 with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, isn’t available. Only the staff suite — the servants’ quarters, to be Downton Abbey about it — is. And it’s $148 a night. 

Pros: wifi, cable TV, “cooked breakfast.” Cons: trundle bed. Also really quite good: tours of the main house, courtesy of the current owners. Fascinating house lore: Wright took the commission after being beseeched by Maude Cooke: “Dear Mr. Wright, Will you please help us get the beautiful house we have dreamed of for so long?” We are totally going to use that tactic with Santiago Calatrava.

If you’re looking for a more permanent relationship with the house, it’s now on the market for $2.75 million.

Meet your guide

Diane Rommel

Diane Rommel

Diane Rommel has written for The Wall Street Journal, Outside, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Travel + Leisure, Wallpaper and Afar, as well as The Cut, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and McSweeney’s. She once drove from London to Mongolia, via Siberia.
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