When you see the house - experience is the best word, actually - you instinctively understand why Reisley never left, why he welcomes architecture students, journalists, film crews and the curious to explore it under his charismatic tutelage, and why he wrote a book about the house and the sylvan community in which it resides, Usonia.
This house - and the overall design of the 100-acre wooded oasis near the suburban New York village of Pleasantville - was the work of none other than Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the most famous and influential architect who ever lived.
Reisley's life is centered around the house that now bears his name in architectural circles - the Roland Reisley House. He credits the house for not simply enriching his life but also extending it.
Roland Reisley is 100 years old and the last living client of the great architect still residing in the house Wright designed for him. Unusual for most of Wright's clients, Reisley became friends with Wright and considered the architect a mentor, despite Wright's reputation for being intimidating and dogmatic.
Wright had a flair for attracting attention, in part for his sartorial flamboyance and a personal life that was fodder for tabloids. But it's for the groundbreaking collection of architecture he left the world that he is cherished today. Wright was a brilliant demolisher of architectural norms who replaced them with modern visions he was the first to see. He rejected the idea that houses needed to be shaped like a box - the all-too-common New England saltbox comes to mind - stuffed inside with smaller boxes (rooms) strictly defined by function.
Instead, Wright envisioned an America with a bold new architectural character: low-slung houses that harmonized with their natural setting. In his later homes, these houses were fitted with the convenience of carports - Wright's term - and stunning projecting eaves that emphasized horizontality.
Inside was what we might call today a "great room," centered around a fireplace, with Wright-designed built-in furniture, wood paneling, and stonework. (Paint for the walls? Not needed.) This space flowed into an open dining area and kitchen, a part of the home he would call "the workspace." Indeed, on his drafting table and then in reality, Wright wiped out this warren of domestic cubes in favor of flowing living spaces, profoundly familiar today but radical in the first half of the 20th century.
Usonia was about getting to the core of what is needed in a house, a no-frills beauty connected to the land, and using authentic materials like stone and wood, explains Jorge Otero-Pailos, professor and director of historic preservation at Columbia University's Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. If the houses were small by today's standards, the swell of pride felt by their owners was outsized.
Wright "just created a completely different idea of what a house can be, what we look at today as the open plan. This is something that Frank Lloyd Wright pretty much invented," Otero-Pailos said.
"He is someone that inspired people when he was alive, and has continued to inspire people into the present day. And he was making art with architecture. He was making large sculptures," the professor added.
But these sculptures had to serve as homes. They were elegant, sure, but they were also designed for the way Wright believed modern families wanted to live -- families like the Reisleys, who, with his late wife, Ronny, raised their children here. The Reisleys were among many families embracing this experiment of collective living in Usonia, applying certain aspects of the urban apartment co-op building to life in the Westchester wilderness, but with an egalitarian bent.
These young pioneers, against great odds and with limited funds, managed to assemble a forested plot of hilly, rocky land, which they believed could provide a suitable setting for a Wright-designed Usonian community. From the 1930s to his death in 1959, Wright extolled his vision for Usonia - short for United States of North America, with the letter "i" added to make the word sound better.
He saw Americans as fellow Usonians who could live well in his homes, away from the bustle of city life, and Otero-Pailos points to the idea of "use" connoted in the neologism Usonia. Usonia was a novel, if practical, concept of how people could live in suburban communities.
If in his early career, Wright catered to wealthy clients living in his large Prairie houses, his later years saw him bring his evolving design philosophy if not to the masses, then certainly to well-educated young middle-class Americans, perhaps a little light in the wallet but ample in determination to invest in the Wright way of life.
When approached in the early 1940s by Usonia's young founders - David Henken and Aaron Resnick - Wright invited the men to train under him. Wright would, in time, agree to design Usonia, sketching its serpentine roads and setting the homes on one-acre plots, with their boundaries unclear, to give the idea of living amid nature, not imposing human order upon it.
He thought of how best to place the houses to take advantage of the site, Otero-Pailos explains, considering things like the course of light throughout the day and the importance of selecting a stirring natural vista to enjoy through the vast window, nature's giant flatscreen TV.
He would design three of the homes, with 45 more emerging from the drawing boards of his approved architects. (Reisley's house is on a hill, and Wright insisted on setting it "of the hill," built into it as if it were an organic outcropping, rather than atop the hill, as would have been the more common choice and Reisley's original desire. Wright, of course, was right.)
In 1950, Roland Reisley, all of 26, and his wife were living in an apartment in Manhattan's Upper West Side and pictured a better life for themselves away from the urban grind, a place to put down roots and start a family. But where? When the Reisleys learned of Usonia, fate whispered eureka. They were immediately welcomed when they visited and picked a plot of land to buy. Reisley then forged the emotional steel to approach Wright to design his home, and he was rewarded with a resounding yes.
Reisley found Wright a delight to work with, the experience counter to the great man's reputation of being obstinate in deviating from his vision, with Wright pushing him to move ahead with construction even when cash shortages (and inevitable Wrightian cost overruns) threatened the project. Wright knew the Reisleys wouldn't regret it, and, again, he was right.
The Reisleys even approached him a few years later when their growing family necessitated an expansion of the home. Again, Wright obliged. Reisley has left the house virtually unchanged over the years, as it served him well and met his family's needs.
As his 101st birthday approaches this May, Reisley reflects on research that suggests living surrounded by beauty may extend one's life by years.
Reisley may be the textbook case.
"The neuroscientists tell us that awareness of beauty over a long time reduces stress, and reducing stress can have physiological benefits, perhaps even contributing to longevity. I think that may be true, " Reisley said.
Reisley is used to comments about how he doesn't look his age. Flattering though they may be, such observations by others prompt introspection in Reisley.
"I realized that there was not a day of my life I didn't see something beautiful here. Some little detail, the light on the stone, the grain of the wood, how the boards are mitered together, all kinds of little things," Reisley said as the soft winter sunlight streamed through his living room, illuminating subtle tableaus of ephemeral grace that proved his point. "I'm aware of the beauty of the house, its interaction with the land, the inside, outside."
The wider community of Frank Lloyd Wright scholars and enthusiasts are grateful for Reisley's decades of research and advocacy. He's been retired since 1985 - he's a trained physicist who worked in the electronics instruments trade for years. But Reisley has never stepped away from the scholarly beat of uncovering the story of Usonia while shedding new light on the famed architect and one of his most exquisite creations.
"Every community that has a heritage to uphold, architectural heritage in particular, needs an advocate, and Roland Reisley is that advocate," Otero-Pailos said. "Over the course of decades he has spoken brilliantly about the importance of the Usonian homes, how they fit into his personal life, how they helped him raise his children, but also how they fit into the larger American story."