Inside Samuel Cupples House In St. Louis | NO AI

In the 1850s, a young man stepped off a riverboat at the St. Louis levee with hardly a buck to spare and almost no formal schooling to his name. 40 years later, he was one of the richest men in the Midwest, and the house he built on West Pine Boulevard still looks like a castle dropped into the middle of a city. Hi everyone, Ken here. Hit that subscribe button and let's explore this house. In 1831, Samuel Couples was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Though his father ran a school in Pittsburgh, he had almost no formal education and was working in a grocery store by the age of At 15, he moved to Cincinnati and took a job with a woodenware merchant, learning a trade built on the humble goods every household needed. Sent downriver to sell those goods, he was told by Riverman that St. Louis was the real gateway to the West. In 1851 he settled there and opened his own business on the levee dealing in buckets, tubs, brooms, washboards, and cordage. The timing was perfect because the city was booming and his firm grew from a wholesale house into a manufacturer that was reorganized in 1883 as the Samuel Copples Woodenware Company which became the largest of its kind in the country, with an annual volume equal to that of all of its competitors combined. With his business partners, he built Couples Station in the 1890s, a downtown complex of warehouses served directly by rail spurs so the trains could load and unload beneath the buildings themselves. An idea so efficient it essentially cornered the city's freight trade. This of course made him incredibly wealthy and with that wealth he set out to build his dream home. Couples hired the St. Louis architect Thomas B. Annan and sent him to England to draw inspiration. And Annan came back home struck by the emerging arts and crafts movement and the designs of William Morris. What he produced between 1888 and 1890 was a Richardsonian Romanesque house, a style named for the architect Henry Hobson Richardson and far more common in churches and city halls than in private homes. The walls are purple sandstone from Colorado set on a foundation of pink Missouri granite quarried from the Elephant Rocks region in the southern part of the state. Skilled European stone carvers chiseled the rough blocks into something alive, running carved vines along the balconies and tucking gargoyles, mythical animals, and squat little dwarves around the downspouts and gutters. Rounded towers sheathed in copper and a run of fantastical chimneys give the house one of the most theatrical rooflines in the city. Annan's original 1888 building permit estimated the cost at $150,000, but the finished house came to about $500,000, more than three times that estimate and a staggering sum for a home in 1890, equivalent to roughly $18.3 million in today's dollars. As we look at the floor plan, I'd like to invite you to join our members program. Ranging from 99 cents all the way up to $20 per month, it is a great way to support our research and the production of these videos. You'll also gain access to daily members-only community posts. Anyways, enough about that, let's head inside. You enter through a vestibule and a front foyer, the small dim threshold that makes the hall beyond feel enormous. It is a quiet, low space that squeezes and compresses you before releasing you into the cavernous interior. From here, the house opens into its great center hall, a room of dark, richly carved woodwork rising to the ceiling, with the grand staircase anchoring it at the rear. The floors here, like much of the house, are English quarter sawn oak, and Copples, a man who had made his money in wood, made sure that virtually no surface went uncarved or unembellished. At the far end of the entrance hall is the first floor reception room, the formal space where guests were received. Its walls hung with hand-painted wallpaper and its woodwork as fussed over as everything else. It's worth taking a moment to see the room as it appeared in the old black and white photos because while the furniture has come and gone across more than 130 years, the bones of the room, the mantle, the panelling, their proportions are unmistakably the same. Next comes the music room which holds a distinction all its own as the only room in the house whose woodwork was painted rather than left in a natural finish. Copples' own Steinway Piano still stands here and still plays. And a commode across from the fireplace is an exact copy of one made for Louis XIV at Versailles. The vintage black and white photograph of this room, laid next to the color views of it today, show how faithfully the space has been brought back to the way the family knew it. The library was clearly a room Copples loved, lined floor to ceiling with built-in bookcases fronted in glass, their oak as deeply carved as the mantle. Above the fireplace is a Latin motto which translates as life without literature is death, a fitting creed for a man who had so little schooling and valued learning so highly. A generous window seat tucks into the room and an unfinished portrait of Couples himself hangs among the shelves. The formal dining room sits on the far side of the hall, another exercise in carved wood and heavy comfortable grandeur where the family and their guests gathered for dinners and galas. Because Couples was a strict Methodist who did not approve of dancing, there was no ballroom in this house, so the dining room and the other first floor rooms carried the full weight of the family's entertaining. Just off the rear of the house is the conservatory, a round glass roofed playroom added in 1904 and designed by Theodore Link, the architect of St. Louis' Union Station. Beyond the family rooms lies the service side of the house, with the kitchen and butler's pantry where we can imagine the family's full-time staff catering their every meal. Return to the center hall and the great staircase is the thing you cannot stop looking at. It climbs in broad, carved runs of oak, turning at a landing before rising to the second floor. In the newel posts, balusters and paneling are worked with the same restless invention as the rest of the house. A place where, as the docents like to say, The architect left virtually no surface unembellished. When traveling back in time to the old black and whites, this may be the most rewarding comparison of all because the staircase has changed so little over the years. Set the century-old image beside the staircase as it stands today and the same carved rail runs up to the same landing with the same light falling from the same window above. Now that window is the house's crown jewel. At the upper stair landing glows a great stained glass window known as the Zodiac Window. dated 1889 and attributed by the museum to Tiffany Studios from a design by the English artist Edward Burne-Jones, carrying a poem by the St. Louis writer Eugene Field, one of several art glass windows set throughout the house. Upstairs, the second floor was the family's private world, and the couple's bedroom, served by its own bath, opens off the main hall with the same dark woodwork carried up from below. At the southwest corner of that floor is a sitting room, one of the quieter, sunnier spaces in the house where the family could retreat away from the formal rooms downstairs. Couples outlived his wife and all of his natural children. He passed in his home in 1912 at the age of 80. His personal estate was valued at just over $1.5 million, a figure that did not begin to count the millions he had already given away to local schools, hospitals, and charities. In his will, Couples ordered that the house not be sold for at least eight years and pointedly that it never be sold to St. Louis University whose growing campus had begun to crowd his view. His heirs held it until 1919 then sold it to the railroad telegraphers who made the mansion their national headquarters and tore down the stables. In 1946 the house passed in conflict with the will to St. Louis University which paid $50,000 for it and turned it into a student center complete with a bowling alley and a bar in the basement. By 1970, the offices had moved out and the building was slated for demolition, black with soot and worn down by decades of hard use. It was saved by a single determined Jesuit, Father Maurice B. McNamee, an art historian who had spent years volunteering for building committees just to keep the wrecking ball away, and who then rolled up his sleeves and led the restoration himself. The house reopened to the public in 1975, was named a city landmark, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. Today it is a museum, home to Saint Louis University's collections of fine and decorative art and the Eleanor Turchin Glass Collection, with the McNamee Gallery on its lower level. And on that happy note, I'll turn it over to you. Which room was your favorite? Let me know down below in the comments section and while you're there, make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an exciting episode of This House.