Houses of Missouri: 1870 1940 (Suburban Domestic Architecture)

Described as neither east nor west nor north nor south, Missouri served, for much of the 19th century, as America s gateway to somewhere else, the half-point to the western frontier.

It has been home to the nation s richest farmers, ambitious immigrant entrepreneurs, and American visionaries Mark Twain and Thomas Hart Benton. Their houses were quirky mid-American interpretations of East Coast and European idioms distilled by homegrown architects.

At Westmoreland Place, Portland Place, and Parkview in St. Louis and the model Country Club District in Kansas City, progressive civil engineers, planners, and landscape designers transformed wheat fields and flower-strewn prairies into sophisticated planned communities that remain to this day the best places in town to live.

With nearly 300 archival photographs, drawings, and original floor plans, HOUSES OF MISSOURI, 1880 1940, offers an intimate tour behind the facades of 45 purely American houses. Among these are Greystone, the pastoral Gothic cottage of Major Emory Foster in Pavely; Oak Hill, the opulent mansion of the legendary Kansas City Star publisher William Rockhill Nelson; the iconoclastic machine in the prairie, Samuel Marx-designed Ladue residence for department store magnate Morton May; and Chatol, the striking Art Moderne farmhouse in rural Boone county. The authors bring to life the fortunes, motivations, and aspirations of their wealthy and upstanding house owners who rigorously defined what was suitable and respectable living in America s heartland.