There’s a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Hudson Valley that most people don’t know they can visit. It sits on a private island in the middle of Lake Mahopac, reachable only by boat, and for a few hours at a time, small groups of visitors step into it—not as spectators kept at a distance, but as guests moving freely through the rooms, sitting on the furniture, and taking in the architecture at full scale. This year’s tours begin on June 1.
Wright, the most influential American architect of the 20th century, reshaped domestic design with his emphasis on horizontal lines, open plans, and a deep integration of buildings with their natural surroundings. His “organic architecture” philosophy—structures growing out of their sites rather than imposed upon them—produced icons like Fallingwater and Taliesin, but relatively few of his residential commissions are accessible to the public in such an intimate way. Many remain private homes, and even those open to visitors are typically experienced at a remove, with barriers, timed pathways, and strict preservation protocols.
Petra Island Tours, now entering their fourth season, offer something different: access to the Massaro House, built in 2008 from a set of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original plans, alongside the smaller Chahroudi cottage, the only structure on the island completed during Wright’s lifetime. What was once an intensely private retreat has become, in carefully measured doses, a destination.
For Joe Massaro, the tours began almost as a thought experiment. After years of splitting time between the island and Florida, he found himself looking for a new project. “I was minding my business, living my life,” he says, when he came across the visitation numbers for Fallingwater. If that Pennsylvania landmark could draw 150,000 visitors a year, he wondered, what might be possible on a much smaller, more remote scale?
The constraints were obvious from the start. Petra Island isn’t accessible by road. There’s no way to move crowds through it. “We’re limited to the number of people we could take there on every tour,” Massaro says. Rather than treat that as a limitation, he built the experience around it—small groups, higher price point, and a level of access that would be unthinkable at a larger institution.
“It’s not your regular tour,” he says. “There’s no ropes up. You can go in every room. You can sit on the furniture, and I tell you a story of how I built the house.”
That last part—the story—is central. The Massaro House is not a preservation project in the traditional sense. Wright designed a home for the island in the late 1940s for the Chahroudi family, but only the smaller cottage was completed before his death. Decades later, Massaro acquired the property and, working from Wright’s original drawings, undertook the complex and often contentious process of realizing the larger house. He describes the result simply: “I didn’t change a thing when I built that house—just as per Frank Lloyd Wright’s plans.”
The tours trace that arc. Visitors begin at a dock on Lake Mahopac, where they board a small boat—13 passengers at most—and set out across the water. The ride itself is part of the experience, a slow reveal of the island and its architecture. Along the way, Massaro and his family—who operate the tours together—offer a running commentary on the lake’s history and the unlikely path that led him to Petra Island.
Once ashore, the experience unfolds in two parts. The Chahroudi cottage, compact and low-slung, offers a glimpse of Wright’s work as it existed in his lifetime. It has been restored with attention to period detail, including family photographs of its original owners. The Massaro House, by contrast, is expansive and theatrical, its geometry and materials translating Wright’s vision into a contemporary structure that still feels rooted in mid-century modernism.
Visitors move through both spaces with an unusual degree of freedom. After the guided portion of the tour, there’s time to wander, to double back into rooms, to photograph details that might otherwise be glimpsed only briefly. “They can go back into any room they want,” Massaro says.
That openness shapes the tone of the experience. “One lady said to me, ‘It’s not like going on a tour, it’s like going to a friend’s house,’” he recalls. It’s a telling distinction. Where many architectural landmarks emphasize preservation through distance, Petra Island leans into immersion.
The response, Massaro says, has been consistent. “They’re just amazed,” he says of visitors. In the first three years, attendance grew steadily—from 500 to 750 to 1,000 visitors—with what he describes as “100 percent customer satisfaction” each season. Word of mouth, he believes, will continue to drive growth, even within the limits imposed by the site.
The audience is not quite what one might expect. While Frank Lloyd Wright devotees certainly make the trip, Massaro notes that the crowd skews older and, interestingly, predominantly female. “Most of them are retired,” he says. “And they just love coming out here.” The tours have also drawn an international contingent, with visitors traveling from as far as Australia and Japan—evidence of Wright’s enduring global reach.
There is, too, a personal dimension to the operation. Massaro, his wife, and their daughters all play a role in running the tours, from piloting the boats to guiding visitors through the houses. He still leads many of the tours himself, even as the next generation takes on more of the day-to-day management.
For Massaro, who spends summers living on the island, the project has deepened his connection to the house rather than diminishing it. “The more I live there, the more I fall in love with that house,” he says.
That sense of ongoing discovery may be part of what visitors respond to. Petra Island is not a frozen artifact. It’s a lived-in space, shaped by both Wright’s original vision and the long, improbable effort to bring that vision into being decades later.
In a region rich with historic estates and cultural sites, Petra Island occupies a category of its own: part architectural pilgrimage, part family enterprise, part experiment in how much access is enough. The experience lasts only a couple of hours. The memory of it—approaching by water, stepping into a Wright-designed space, and moving through it without barriers—lingers longer.
Tours of Petra Island run seasonally from late spring through fall, with departures currently scheduled three days a week—typically Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays—with midday and afternoon options. Tickets are $150 per person, with group sizes capped at just over a dozen to preserve the intimate feel. After booking, visitors receive detailed instructions for parking and boat departure on Lake Mahopac, followed by a roughly two-hour experience that includes the boat ride, guided tour of both houses, and time to explore the grounds. Reservations are required.
This article appears in Spring/Summer 2026.
