Westhope, also known as the Richard Lloyd Jones House, is a house at 3704 South Birmingham Avenue in the Midtown neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, it was completed in 1931 for his cousin Richard Lloyd Jones, the publisher of the Tulsa Tribune. It is one of three buildings in Oklahoma that Wright designed, and it has sometimes been cited as the only one of Wright's textile-block houses outside California. The structure is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Westhope is a two-story structure on a flat prairie site covering about . The estate includes a guesthouse, a garage, lawns, a pool, and a pond. Westhope's textile blocks are arranged in vertical piers, which are fastened together by metal rebar and lack decorations. The textile block piers alternate with vertical glass bays with 5,200 panes of glass covering almost half the exterior of the structure. The home is variously cited as having five or six bedrooms and is one of Wright's largest house designs. The spaces are arranged in an open plan, intersecting at 90-degree angles, and are decorated with textile blocks. The house was controversial when it was completed, with some observers comparing it to a glass house or a penitentiary.
Wright informally discussed plans for the house with the Joneses during 1928, and Jones sent him a list of specifications later that year. After Wright revised the plans, Jones hired Paul Mueller as the Jones House's general contractor, and construction began in 1930. The building exceeded its original construction budget, with a final cost of $100,000. Jones died at his house in 1963, and his widow sold it to the local architect M. Murray McCune, who renovated it. Westhope was subsequently sold to the Nelson family in 1982, the Holden family in the late 1980s, and the Tyson family in 1993. After falling into disrepair, the house was sold in 2021 to the investor Stuart Price, who renovated the house before reselling it in 2025.
Site The Richard Lloyd Jones House is located at 3704 South Birmingham Avenue in the Midtown neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States. The site covers almost and is located on a flat prairie. When the house was built, it faced the Arkansas River, and the house could be seen from the Arkansas River valley as far as away. What is now the Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Area, across the river to the southwest, was also visible from the house. The estate includes a guesthouse, which includes a living–dining room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. Also on the estate is a garage, which is variously cited as having a capacity of four or five cars. There is also a koi pond, a lawn, and a swimming pool, in addition to a workshop building, garden room, and patios.
Architecture The Jones House, built for the family of the newspaper publisher Richard Lloyd Jones, is sometimes known as Westhope or the Big House. It is one of three structures that Frank Lloyd Wright (Jones's cousin) designed in Oklahoma, the others being the Harold Price Jr. House and the Price Tower in Bartlesville. Westhope has also sometimes been cited as Wright's only textile-block house to be built outside California, where he had designed the Millard House, the Storer House, the Freeman House, and the Ennis House in the 1920s. Throughout his career, Wright tended to not use ornamental motifs in his designs, the California houses being an exception to this rule; one writer said that "from the Jones House on, the ornamental in Wright's buildings became increasingly pure architecture".
Exterior Various parts of the exterior range in height from one to two stories, and the facade is articulated so that some of the rooms inside are visually separate from the rest of the house. Similarly to in Wright's California houses, Westhope's textile blocks are fastened together by metal rebar, rather than the mortar joints used in contemporary masonry buildings. The textile blocks alternate with vertical bays of glass, which are the same width as the textile-block piers. Wright had previously used such a design, with alternating glass bays and concrete piers, in the Millard House's living room. All of Westhope's concrete blocks have embedded specks of pigmentation, in contrast to the untinted blocks of Wright's California houses, though Wright had previously considered using pigmented blocks on two occasions. The blocks are variously described as having a yellow or "Oklahoma pink" hue. The floor slabs are beveled and are not visible on the facade.
Westhope's blocks lack decorative engravings and measure wide; they are variously cited as measuring or long. The blocks contrast with those of the California houses which used blocks measuring across, with engraved patterns. The architectural writer Robert McCarter quoted another commentator as saying that Westhope's larger blocks "produce a paradoxical decrease in apparent mass". The exterior walls are made of two layers of textile blocks, and each block has grooves where metal rebar is inserted. Waterproof cement is poured into the joints between each block. In addition, there is an asphalt veneer along the inner faces of the outer layer of blocks, which Wright believed would be waterproof and fireproof. The exterior blocks were created using hinged-metal molds.
The home features 5,200 panes of glass covering almost half the exterior of the structure, which are arranged in strips measuring 20 inches wide. The window panes are arranged in grids, and some elevations of the facade are made entirely of glass. The grids are composed of copper frames with movable or fixed-position glass panes that swing outward. According to Wright, the movable windows would make the building easier to heat and cool down. The window frames are held in place by vertical grooves engraved into the blocks. The vertical design details of Westhope's facade contrasted significantly with Wright's previous Prairie Style work, which tended to be horizontally-oriented, with flat roofs and horizontal bands of windows.
Interior The home is variously cited as having five or six bedrooms. There are five bathrooms, including one partial bathroom. It encompasses approximately , making it one of the largest houses Wright ever designed. The spaces are divided across two stories and are arranged on a grid measuring across. Despite the house's large size, the interior spaces are arranged to create a cozy ambience.
Materials The concrete floor slabs were poured in-place. The rooms are separated by half-height partition walls. The walls, which connect various pillars supporting the ceiling, were intended to give the house a more open feel. The interior walls are made of plain textile blocks, while the ceilings are made of coffered textile blocks with patterned fascia, forming a grid. The ceiling grid was not part of the original plan, which called for concrete ceiling beams spaced every . The perforated blocks were created using plaster molds, and the ceiling blocks with fascia were constructed using wooden molds. To save money, Wright did not use mill-work in the house.
Although Westhope was built with steam radiators, it originally had no cooling system; when a cooling system was added, the ducts were hidden behind grilles; The heating vents and lighting are hidden behind decorative blocks with perforated patterns. There are five fireplaces throughout the house, in addition to mid-century modern furniture and chairs inspired by some of Wright's other designs. Some of the furniture is similar in style to pieces that Wright would design for John Nesbitt at the Ennis House in 1942. Wright had initially planned to construct furniture made of Met-L-Wood, a material composed of wood with aluminum sheets on either side, but Jones reported that this material was uncomfortable. Though most of the Met-L-Wood furniture was not built because of cost overruns during construction, Wright did design a cabinet, bookshelves, and a desk and chair for Jones's study.
Rooms The spaces are arranged in an open plan, blending into one another and intersecting at 90-degree angles. The first floor includes the communal spaces, including the foyer, living room, dining room, game room, recreation room, and kitchen. The foyer, stairs, dining room, and kitchen are clustered within a cruciform room in one corner of the first floor. Extending beyond it is the living room, The living room has full-height glass windows and is called the lantern room; it is named for the fact that, at night, the room seemed to glow like a lantern. The eastern wall of the living room faces the street and is shorter, without any canopies above it. The western wall of the living room faces the house's swimming pool and is shaded under a canopy. When the house was built, the western wall also had an exterior loggia.
The dining room, surrounded on all sides by other rooms, has a wet bar and two kitchen islands. Next to the kitchen and slightly below the living room is a sunken family room or billiards room. Both the billiards room and the entrance foyer have glass conservatories protruding into the house's yards. Two of the bedrooms (including the master bedroom), two bathrooms, and a study are located on the first floor next to the communal spaces. These rooms are located in one corner of the living room, while a maid's bedroom and garage are diagonally across the living room from the bedrooms. The other bathrooms and bedrooms are on the second floor, while there is an observation tower above the second floor.
History Between 1923 and 1924, Wright had designed the four textile-block houses in California, three of them nearly simultaneously. These buildings leaked because of deficiencies in the concrete that was used to create each of the California houses. After he completed the California houses, Wright occasionally used concrete blocks along with other methods of construction, in such buildings as the Arizona Biltmore Hotel.
Richard Lloyd Jones was six years younger than Wright. In the 1900s and 1910s, Jones had worked at various newspapers, at one point owning the Wisconsin State Journal before becoming the Tulsa Tribune publisher in 1919. Jones and Wright had differing personalities and frequently made sarcastic quips at one another, but they were close friends. Wright was in debt for much of his life, and his financial status was even more precarious during the Great Depression, while Jones was somewhat more financially successful. Jones wanted to hire Wright not only to give his struggling cousin some money, but also to provide for Jones, his wife, and their three children (Richard Jr., Jenkin and Florence). Subsequently, Jones and his family bought about on a hill near the Arkansas River in Tulsa.
Development
Early plans
Wright informally discussed plans for the house with the Joneses during 1928. According to Jones's son Jenkin, Wright had initially sketched out a "rambling" wood and stucco house with a nearly-flat roof, surrounding a courtyard; the writer Meryle Secrest stated that such a design would have been in line with Jones's tastes and similar Oklahoma houses. Conversely, the writer Robert Sweeney says that Wright's original drawings called for a building with a steep roof over part of it, arranged on a grid of 30-60-90 triangles. In November 1928, Wright wrote a particularly caustic letter to Jones describing him as "a Puritan and a publican of the worst stripe", Jones wrote an angry nine-page response. After this dispute, Jones wrote to Wright detailing what he wanted in the new house. Jones stipulated that the house have a living room, a dining room, a billiards room, a study, five bedrooms, and a four-car garage. The original budget has variously been cited as $30,000 or $40,000.