Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
4600 Lindell
314-367-0700
In 1895, Ann Allen Donaldson used her parents’ fortune to build a mansion on Lindell Boulevard, and in 1911, members of The Saint Louis Woman’s Club took the place as their clubhouse. By 1922, they’d paid off their loan and vowed to incur no more debt. But seven years later, they hired William Ittner’s architecture firm to do a $90,000 renovation.
The firm didn’t touch the neoclassical façade, dove gray sharpened by black detailing and white Ionic columns, but it tore out the grand stairway, enclosed the porch as a tearoom (it’s now a bar), put in a “scientific”
kitchen, and did up a men’s lounge in weathered oak. The club burned the second mortgage in a copper bowl in 1943. Its standards have yet to fall: One simply can’t slouch on the scroll-armed Greek Revival divans or rest a Starbucks cup on the veined white marble commode à vantaux in the grand hall, modeled on a piece designed for Marie Antoinette.
The chandeliers’ soft, sparkly light is multiplied by antique pier mirrors, tall and slender as a ballerina en pointe. There’s much to reflect: porcelain vases made in Paris in the late 1700s; hand-painted wallpaper; a frieze carved in Moorish style and curved to fit the bay window; a desk like one in the Japanese exhibit at the 1904 World’s Fair. The prospect of that fair inspired the Woman’s Club, created in 1903 as a place to converse about the humanities. It became “a refuge from the strain of World War II,” and later thoughts of moving west were vetoed. The home had been gracious enough to host Sir Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt. Who could reproduce its beauty?
