Shortly after Deborah and Greg Lapp married, they ran into a problem: Deborah’s house on the King River in California wasn’t big enough for Greg’s grand piano.
“I had built it with my late husband,” Deborah said in an interview. “Greg and I were newly married, and so we decided we would build our own house.”
The couple hoped to stay nearby, along the river, but they struggled to find a suitable plot of land for sale. “There wasn’t any land close,” according to Deborah.
After roughly a year of searching, they finally spotted a riverside for-sale sign while kayaking. The couple memorized the phone number and paddled back to shore. Shortly after getting in touch with the real estate agent, they made an offer on the plot in Sanger, California.
That was nearly 20 years ago.
Now, the Lapps are selling the property, complete with their two-bedroom, two-bathroom home known as the Lapp RiverHouse, for $2.3 million. Real estate agents Layla Granata and Nader Assemi of SME Real Estate of Side Inc. hold the listing.
Designing a dream home
After purchasing the nearly 8-acre property in 2006, Deborah got to work thinking up the design for a house.
“I started to draw a floor plan,” Deborah said. “I woke up in the morning, Greg is drawing all over the floor plan with a little model piano and model table, and I realized that we’re going to have to work together. It’s not going to be just my plan anymore.”
That’s when she enlisted the help of Arthur Dyson — a former Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice who’s designed more than 700 buildings, including Deborah’s first house.
“We told him that we wanted the roofline to match the layout of the hills, the landscapes of the Sierra foothills in which it sits,” Deborah said.
When the Lapps bought the land, there was a “party barn” on the property. The previous owners used the structure to host events and store “all their water toys,” according to Deborah.
The Lapps converted that space into an apartment “for sleepovers or a caretaker or somebody like that,” Deborah said.
Living on the King River
Deborah said weekends at the house were particularly special.
“We would go to work during the week and come up and just relax in the evenings. That was lovely,” she said. “Then on the weekend, we generally had people come up, and so it was just wonderful to have people.”
But if not for that hosting, there wouldn't have been many other people nearby. "There are 3 acres of forest on one side and 3 acres of forest on the other side, so we basically have no neighbors," Greg said.
The Lapps, however, regularly hosted concerts, pizza parties and benefits. They planted gardens and orchards and vineyards. They even used their space to host friends when the COVID-19 pandemic demanded distance.
“Friends could come and sit 10 feet away from us on our terrace,” Deborah said. “We could still see them … We managed to get through the pandemic that way.”
Now, the couple is headed to the Catskills in New York, where their daughter lives. There, they’ll live in an “old hunting lodge in a forest by a creek,” according to Deborah.
“It’s a pretty sweet situation,” she said.
This story was corrected on April 24 to identify the real estate agents of record.