Kansas City Houses: 1888–1938
Michael C. Kathrens
New photography by Bruce Mathews
Foreword by Steve Noll
Published in association with Minnesota Prairie Wind Foundation
REPRINTED
This first comprehensive book on the rich architectural heritage of Kansas City profiles forty of the city’s finest houses built between 1888 to 1938. Best-selling author Michael Kathrens describes the exterior and interior architecture, as well as the circumstances behind the commission and the background of the families who lived in these splendid homes. Kathrens’s authoritative yet accessible text is complemented throughout by drawings, floor plans, archival images, and newly commissioned photographs––a treat for architectural scholars and enthusiasts alike.
October 2018
Hardcover
400 pages
502 illustrations (168 in color)
9.25 x 12.25 inches
ISBN: 978-0983863229
$75.00
Description
“What treasures Michael Kathrens’s beautiful book brings out of this city’s neighborhoods… some of the most magnificent homes in the country.”
–William O’Connor, Daily Beast
House lovers cherish Michael C. Kathrens’s survey of historic homes in Kansas City, another important volume documenting 19th- and early-20th-century high-end residential architecture in America. Built mostly in revival and Beaux Arts styles between 1880 and 1930—the city’s boom years—these midwestern gems display remarkable craftsmanship and reflect the outsized fortunes of the influential Kansas Citians who built them and speak to the importance of this Midwestern metropolis.
Among the forty superb homes featured—each well documented with archival and new photography as well as floor plans—are Oak Hall (1887) built for newspaper publisher William Rockhill Nelson, whose fortune helped establish the Nelson-Atkins Museum; the magnificent Corinthian Hall (1910), the classical mansion built by Henry F. Hoit for lumber baron Robert A. Long; the modern masterpiece designed by Edward W. Tanner for Walter E. Bixby of Kansas City Life Insurance, with Kem Weber’s widely admired interiors; and two beautifully eclectic houses by local architect Mary Rockwell Hook, one of the first women to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
About the Author
Michael C. Kathrens is an independent scholar specializing in American residential architecture and interior decoration of the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. His previous books include the bestselling monograph American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer, two volumes on the splendid private residences in New York City, Great Houses of New York 1880–1930 and Great Houses of New York, 1880–1940, as well as Kansas City Houses 1885–1938.
