The House He Saved

Everything else Barney earned for himself: the businesses, the ships, the paintings, the house on Lake Washington built to hold a collection. This chapter is about the opposite instinct — the one time he spent a fortune on something he intended never to own. It belongs at the end of his story because it is, in the plainest sense, the point of the whole life. To understand Barney Ebsworth, don't start with Chop Suey. Start with Ebsworth Park.

The Kraus House

In 1950, Frank Lloyd Wright — by then in his eighties and universally regarded as the greatest American architect of the twentieth century — designed a home for Russell and Ruth Kraus in Kirkwood, a suburb west of St. Louis. Russell was a mosaic and stained-glass artist; Ruth was his wife and partner. Together they had commissioned from Wright a house that embodied his most democratic idea: beautiful architecture for middle-class Americans, modest in scale but radical in design. Wright called such homes Usonian — a word he coined for a uniquely American architecture built from natural materials and designed to dissolve the line between indoors and out.

Built in 1951 at 120 North Ballas Road, it was Wright's first building in the St. Louis area and is considered one of his most complex Usonian designs — one of only five Wright buildings in Missouri. The plan is laid out on Wright's “unit system,” an equilateral parallelogram repeated and intersected throughout, a geometry that feels at once organic and precise, like a leaf or a crystal. The materials — brick, concrete, glass, and tidewater red cypress — are used identically inside and out, so the house seems to grow from the ground rather than sit on it. A central hearth anchors the open living area; radiant heat runs through the concrete slab, warming the rooms from below the way the earth warms a seed. When the glass doors are open onto the surrounding woods, it is impossible to say where the house ends and the forest begins.

The Krauses lived there from January 1956 until Ruth's death in 1992 — thirty-six years inside a masterpiece. They cooked in Wright's kitchen, warmed themselves at Wright's hearth, and grew old in a house designed to make growing old beautiful. When Ruth was gone, Russell faced the question that confronts every owner of an irreplaceable building: what happens to a Frank Lloyd Wright house when the people who commissioned it are gone? Too often in America the answer is demolition, or neglect, or a buyer who “updates” the kitchen, rips out the built-in furniture, paints over the cypress, and calls it renovation. Wright houses have been lost that way — dozens of them.

A Million Dollars, Given Away

In 2001, Barney stepped in. He donated $1 million to fund the purchase and preservation of the Kraus house, established a nonprofit — The Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park — acquired the property and all 10.5 acres of wooded Missouri landscape, oversaw a restoration to its 1956 condition, and then transferred the entire thing to St. Louis County for permanent public use as a park and museum. It is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

He named the park not for himself but for his parents, Alec W. and Bernice W. Ebsworth. Not the Ebsworth Museum. Not the Ebsworth Institute for Architecture. A park — a public green space with a masterpiece at its center, free to walk, open to anyone who wanted to see what Frank Lloyd Wright believed an American home could be.

The contrast is the whole story. Barney's paintings sold at Christie's for hundreds of millions of dollars and scattered to private collectors and museums around the world. The Wright house he gave away — donated, permanently, to the public. Here was a man who had the money to buy anything in the world and chose to buy a modest house designed for the kind of people who grew up, as he had, on one and a half paychecks — and hand it to his city. It is the only Ebsworth property that was never meant to be his. It was always meant to be yours.