If you're on the water this Saturday afternoon and the Lake Lawn Queen glides past slower than usual, trailed by a loose flotilla of curious kayaks and pontoons, that's not a wedding charter. That's a 76-foot double-decker tour boat carrying a boatload of architecture enthusiasts past five buildings most of us have looked at from our own docks for years without knowing what we were looking at.
September 11 and 12 is Wright and Like 2026, and this year the tour lands on Delavan Lake. Most people who live here know there's "a Frank Lloyd Wright house" somewhere along the south shore. Almost nobody realizes the number is five, or that they exist because of a hardware store owner's real estate side hustle in 1900.
Why This Lake, Specifically
The story starts with Henry H. Wallis, a hardware store owner and developer from Oak Park, Illinois, the same town where Wright kept his home and studio. Wallis bought a stretch of Delavan Lake shoreline with a plan to subdivide it and sell lots to his business and social circle back in Chicago. He kept one lot for himself and commissioned Wright to design his own summer house on it. Then, as he sold off the remaining parcels, he did what any good real estate developer would do: he recommended his architect to the buyers.
One of those buyers was Fred B. Jones, a bachelor executive at the Adams & Westlake company, which made hardware fittings for railcars, streetcars, and steamships. Jones bought the lot next to Wallis's in 1900 and asked Wright to design not just a house but the entire property. That commission became Penwern, and it's the reason Wright ended up designing five separate estates on this one lake between 1900 and 1905, plus a yacht clubhouse for the Delavan Lake Yacht Club that was built in 1904 and demolished in 1916 when the club merged with the local golf club.
Compare that density to what most people associate with Wright in this state. The name usually conjures Taliesin in Spring Green or the Johnson Wax buildings in Racine. Delavan Lake rarely makes that list, despite having more Wright commissions clustered on one shoreline than almost anywhere else in southern Wisconsin.
Penwern Is the One Worth Knowing
Penwern is the estate at the center of this weekend's tour, and it's worth knowing the specifics because most of us have driven past its gate for years without a name to attach to it. Jones built it in stages: the boathouse first in 1900, with Japanese-influenced rooflines that are unusual for Wright's early work, the main house in 1901 facing the lake with a broad porch and porte-cochère, then the stable and gatehouse in 1903. The whole property sits on 10 acres with 600 feet of lakefront, and the gatehouse tower was reportedly built specifically so Jones and his weekend guests had somewhere to retreat for late-night card games.
The estate was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It sat through a will dispute after Jones died in 1933, passed to the Robbins family in 1938, and eventually landed with Sue and John Major in 1994, who have spent three decades restoring it toward Wright's original drawings. The boathouse you'll see from the water this weekend isn't the original. It burned in an arson fire in 1978 and wasn't rebuilt until 2005, using a single surviving sheet of Wright's drawings to get the proportions right.
Wright biographer Mark Hertzberg, who wrote the book on Penwern for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, has described the period when it was designed as one where Wright was still finding his footing. "He's in a transitional stage of his career," is how Hertzberg put it, noting that the full Prairie Style wouldn't arrive until the Ward Willits House in 1902, a year after Penwern's main house went up. That transitional quality is part of why architecture people find the lake interesting. You can see Wright working things out in real time across five different buildings within a mile of each other.
What Actually Happens This Weekend
Wright in Wisconsin, the nonprofit running the event, has split it into two days. Friday evening is a reception at Arrowhead, a Wright-inspired home on Lake Geneva designed by architect Ken Dahlin, running 6 to 8 p.m. with a panel discussion around 7 featuring the architect and homeowner. Tickets run $75 for members and $100 for non-members.
Saturday is the main event and the one you'll actually see from the water. Guests board the Lake Lawn Queen for a narrated boat tour past the Wright-designed properties, followed by Hertzberg's lecture on Penwern itself. From there, shuttles run guests from Lake Lawn Resort to Penwern for access to the main house, stable, boathouse, and gate lodge, then next door to the Schwemm House, a 1994 design by architect Brian A. Spencer serving as this year's featured "Like" property, with first-floor and garden access. Additional shuttles cover exterior viewing of the Wallis-GoodSmith House, first-floor access to the Ross Summer House, and exterior viewing of the Spencer Summer Cottage. Saturday tickets are $100 for members and $125 for non-members, with parking staged at Lake Lawn Resort at 2400 East Geneva Street.
The reason this matters if you live here and have no interest in touring anyone's living room: these are private residences the rest of the year. Penwern's owners occasionally allow grounds tours through the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, but full interior and multi-site access like this weekend's tour is not a standing offer. Proceeds go toward Wright in Wisconsin's preservation work, which is the same organization that keeps this cluster of buildings from quietly disappearing into private renovations nobody outside the gate ever hears about.
After the Boat Docks for the Season
Once the tour boat is back at its slip and the shuttles stop running, the fall calendar around the lake doesn't slow down. Two dates are worth marking now if you haven't already.
| Event | Date | Location | What to Expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family Fall Fest | October 11, 2026, noon start | Lake Lawn Resort, 2400 E Geneva St | Live music from The Beaux, an annual fixture at the resort |
| Delavan Brew Walk | Saturday, October 24, 2026, starting around 3:30 p.m. | Downtown Delavan | A self-guided route through more than a dozen downtown storefronts and taverns, each pouring small samples with food pairings along the way |
Both dates come straight from the events themselves rather than secondhand listings. The Beaux have the Fall Fest booking posted on their own tour page, and the Brew Walk's October 24 date is already on Delavan's public event calendars for anyone who wants to plan around it.
None of this requires you to be in the market for anything. That's sort of the point. The people who live on Delavan Lake year-round are the ones who know Jonathan's on Brick Street does a creme brulee worth the wait, that the Watershed Saloon runs a Monday steak night, and that the Wright and Like weekend is the one Saturday a year worth taking the boat out just to see something you'd otherwise only glimpse from the shoulder of South Shore Drive. The lake's real estate history and its daily rhythm turn out to be the same story, just told at different speeds. A hardware store developer's 1900 side project is the reason your Saturday morning boat traffic looks a little different this weekend, and the reason five private estates briefly let the rest of us in the door.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of shoreline, or just curious what a home near this kind of architectural history is worth today, Shannon Blay and the Keefe + Blay team know Delavan Lake's neighborhoods block by block. Reach out for a free home valuation or a walkthrough of what's currently available around the lake.
