A historic Sapulpa home once owned by the founder of Frankoma Pottery has fallen victim to vandalization, according to owner Dan Naegele.
Naegele says he left the house on Friday, July 28th at just after 6:10 pm and that when he arrived home that night around 11:00 pm, he tripped over some sort of pole lying on the floor. When he turned on the lights, he discovered the pole was the handle to a sledgehammer, which had been hurled through the glass in the front of his house.
Naegele says it took him a moment to realize what had happened. “I thought one of my many plants had inadvertently fallen from the nearby console and broken,” he said. “Then I noticed the big hole in the glazed front of the house.”
The John Frank Home, located at 1300 Luker Lane in Sapulpa, just off of Hwy 117, was designed by renowned Oklahoma architect Bruce Goff and built for John Frank and his family in 1956. Both inside and out you’ll see bricks made popular by Frankoma Pottery in a variety of traditional Frankoma colors, including prairie green, pink, harvest gold, and sky blue—and Frankoma tile covers the hearth and the chimney.
The home was placed on the historic registry in 2002 and is known far and wide as one of Goff’s best works. Naegele purchased the home in 2021 and began making repairs, trying to stay true to Goff’s original vision. Now, the home that the worked so hard to restore will face another round of repair, thanks to the senseless vandalism.
Naegele said the sledgehammer had been hurled through the glass, breaking the 3/8″ thick glass and many of the unique and rare Frankoma tiles that it held. Glass and tile pieces were scattered throughout the house, across the living room floor and into the bedrooms. As of yet, the perpetrator has not been identified.
Naegele says the home has been featured in “countless journals in North American, in Europe, and in Japan,” and frequently has visitors who are fans of Frankoma or Bruce Goff. Last October, a Tulsa Foundation for Architecture tour—a fundraiser tour that the owners donated to the TFA— attracted 234 paying visitors to the house.
