After buying Frank Lloyd Wright‘s iconic Theodore A. Pappas House in St. Louis, preservationist Michael Miner plans to turn it into a museum.
The home, one of only two that the beloved American architect designed in the Missouri city, was designed in the Usonian Automatic style. During the heyday of his career, Wright focused on building middle-class homes that would be functional and fit into their environment. These homes were meant to look both modern and remain cost-efficient for a simple family over the years.
The Pappas house is made of brick red concrete blocks that the original owners, Bette and Ted Pappas, put together themselves based on Wright’s designs — the architect designed it in 1955 and the Pappas family finished building it in 1964. It sits at 3,000 square feet, boasts four bedrooms and sits on more than three acres of wooded land.
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After Bette Pappas died at age 91 in 2018, her children listed the house for $1.95 million. According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, it was later relisted for $1.2 million but the details of the sale have not been released. Miner is the head of the Frank Lloyd Wright Revival Initiative and a Wright documentary filmmaker. He announced that he bought the home together with the foundation with plans to restore it and turn it into both a museum and an event space.
“In each case, we want to demonstrate to others that buying a Frank Lloyd Wright building and restoring it to its original condition is not only a benefit to the community in which it located, and is the right thing to do, but is also a wise financial investment,” Miner said in a press release, adding that he also plans to buy a second Wright home.
He plans for the home to be open to the public by June or July with a movie screening of Wright’s life as a way to raise money for future restoration costs.