Photo by Alise O'Brien
Editor's note: This story has been updated to remove the address of the home.
When attorneys Mark and Patty McCloskey bought their home in February of 1988, it was the color of cigarette ashes. Still dirty from the days when St. Louis lay under a blanket of coal smoke, the home’s Carthage marble facing “had quarter-inch-thick carbon on it in some places,” Mark says. The two Carrara marble urns out front, copies of a pair at the Vatican, had turned black, obscuring Neptune and his attending dolphins. The imported Caen limestone in the entry hall had been painted battleship gray, and the intricate wood carvings in the dining room (which, as Mark points out, are so detailed, you can see the birds’ individual claws), were smothered in layers of white and robin’s-egg blue. What had once been St. Louis’ most dazzling mansion now felt more like a haunted house. It didn’t help that the first time Mark and Patty turned the key in the door, the temperature had fallen to 4 below zero and the house didn’t have a functioning furnace. The prior owner had heated the house with 48 kerosene space heaters that had since been removed.
The McCloskeys joke that they were too young and naïve to know what they’d signed up for. But 30 years later, the house is as magnificent as it was when Edward and Anna Busch Faust held court here, meeting guests at the top of the grand staircase for afternoon tea or smoking cigars around the billiard table in the sub-basement.
Adolphus and Lilly Busch, the story goes, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary by giving their children money to build houses. “August Sr. built Grant’s Farm,” Patty says. “Hugo Reisinger, who was married to one of the sisters [Edmee Busch Reisinger], built a big house on Fifth Avenue. Wilhelmina built a castle in Bavaria…”
And Anna and Edward—son of Tony Faust, Adolphus’ best friend—set out to build a Renaissance palazzo. “The goal was to build one of the most lavish and grand houses in the Midwest,” says Patty. They pulled the first permit in 1909, hiring the firm of Barnett, Haynes & Barnett as the architects. Thomas Barnett (who was also designing the Cathedral Basilica at the time) dispatched “a little army” of architects to Europe, mostly to Florence and Rome. They spent two years traveling, sketching, and observing before drawing blueprints for what became a five-level house filled with rooms re-created from Renaissance palaces. In 1912, the Fausts moved in, and they threw their first party that fall. They added a ballroom in 1916 to celebrate their daughter’s society debut. The McCloskeys know this because, in 1990, that daughter, Audrey Faust Wallace, confirmed it herself.
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
“When we first bought the house and I was here on the weekend working on it, I saw two big black cars pull up in front, and a bunch of people get out, including one really old lady,” Mark remembers. “This was probably 1989, when she would have been about 90 years old. She came in with her attendants and some relatives and walked through the house when it was still empty. I asked her if the rumor that we’d been told about the ballroom was true, and she said yes.”
One Sunday morning, Mark decided to also reach out to Mary Faust, who’d married Audrey’s brother Leicester. He spoke with her secretary and then, after identifying himself as one of the new owners of the home, was put on the line with Mrs. Faust. They talked for three hours. “She invited us out to see her. She said, ‘What are you going to do with it?’ I said, ‘We’re going to restore it.’ She said, ‘It’s impossible. No one can afford these days to restore it.’” Patty nods: “She almost didn’t want to have somebody try, because she was afraid it was going to come up short.”
But that didn’t stop Mrs. Faust from sharing photographs of the house with the McCloskeys to help them track down the original furniture and art (including Portrait of Anthony van Opstal, by Anthony van Dyck, c. 1632), or make decisions about how to move forward on the renovation.
For example, the McCloskeys restored all of the French silk damask wallcoverings but on the second floor went with a softer wheat color rather than the original dark red. When Mrs. Wallace died, Mrs. Faust helped them comb through Selkirk’s listings so that they could buy back objects original to the house. But, they say, things sometimes magically showed up, too—like the time a friend in Atlanta called from an antiques fair to tell them about “this guy who’s been trying to sell these books of photographs of a house in St. Louis” that turned out to be big folios of the house. Or the little gold-and-silver–framed portrait of the three youngest Busch girls that randomly surfaced at an auction; it’s a reproduction of a painting that hangs in the house. Of note is the fact that virtually all of the art, furniture, and tapestries are authentic 14th to 17th-century antiques collected by the couple.
Mark says it’s remarkable that they’ve mostly only had to replace art and furniture rather than fixtures—after Anna and Edward died in 1935, the house sat empty for a decade, but nothing was stolen or stripped out. The McCloskeys have had fun seeking out objects original to the house as well as filling it with their own antiques, including a rare 1560 stipo a bambocci carved wooden cabinet made in Genoa and a Louis XIII homme-debout (“standing man”) armoire, so named because, during the Reign of Terror, a gentleman could hide inside one.
In fact, often the biggest challenge was getting rid of things—smog patina, bad paint, weird metal garage doors installed between the solarium and ballroom. For the first year or so, cranes surrounded the house as contractors experimented with a mixture of high-pressure water and sandblasting to get the soot out of the pores of the stone. Then the McCloskeys hired a professional sandblaster to clean the gray paint off the stone of the foyer. At first, the blaster balked, fearing that it was plaster. After Mark encouraged him to experiment in an inconspicuous place under the staircase, he relented.
Now the Caen limestone’s back to its original rosy gold, the perfect complement to a perfect copy of the lampada di Galileo in the Pisa Cathedral. It hangs from the top of the 45-foot-high rotunda dome, in front of a curved double staircase of marble leading to the second- and third-floor landings. The second floor rests on six 14-foot-tall Brescia Violetta marble columns; the third is held up by a series of 12-foot columns and pilasters decorated in a 17th-century Tuscan technique, scagliola, in which colored plaster is layered and polished to mimic marble. The art glass in the rotunda dome is newly restored, and its ceiling features four 28-foot-long classical murals on canvas. “They’re by a guy named Thomas,” Mark says. “We don’t know if that’s a first or last name—we found an article from the period that described him that way, so apparently he was so famous, he didn’t need an introduction.”
A Busch relative told the McCloskeys, “‘There’s a Medici house in Florence where you come in the front door and it’s exactly like this,’” Patty says, “but we haven’t found it yet.” Nor have they been able to verify that the bronze balustrade on the staircase was really forged on site, though that’s the rumor. “One story I did have confirmed was, we’d heard they’d brought in a village of Italian stonemasons that lived in a tent city in the side yard while they finished the stonework,” Mark says. “We ran into a guy at Shaw Marble who said his grandfather was one of those Italians, and that was a true story.”
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
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Photo by Alise O'Brien
Artisans in the foundry of Edward F. Caldwell, where the fixtures in the White House and the Vanderbilt houses were made, re-created the lampada. In fact, every single light fixture—from chandeliers fitted with Tiffany shades to the little lights inside the servants’ quarters closets—is Caldwell. “All the plumbing was made by Mott, which was the premiere manufacturer at the turn of the century,” Mark notes, “and all the door and window hardware was made by P.E. Guerin”—another famous foundry of the era. In the drawing room is a ceiling mural painted by Ferdinand Wagner the Younger, who also painted the murals at 1 Busch Place. The canvas is inset into a walnut-and-gilt ceiling hand carved in Mainz by Bembé (which still exists and now makes parquet floors). The sitting room is also where you’ll see the console for the Aeolian house organ, one of only a handful, including one in the Cartier Mansion on Fifth Avenue, left in the country. The 38-foot-long vox humana pipes run throughout the walls. “If you go downstairs,” Patty says, “there are rooms that are just organ pipes.”
The dining room is a re-creation of a residence chamber in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, constructed in 1458 by Luca Pitti, though its more famous residents included the Medicis and Napoleon Bonaparte. It took six people an entire year to carefully remove multiple layers of paint glommed over the intricate woodwork. The ceiling murals, however, were in great shape: “The guy who owns St. Louis Architectural Bronze said that when he was an art student at Wash. U., he lived here for two years, restoring the ceiling,” Mark says. “This is all on canvas, and it had all fallen in. He put it back up and repainted the parts that needed to be repainted, and you can’t tell.” Across the way in the solarium are gorgeous reproductions of 16th-century stained-glass windows decorated with cartouches, putti, and stylized vegetation, copies of the famous ones in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence. And beyond those glowing panes is one of the most remarkable parts of the house: the ballroom.
It’s 70 feet long and 45 feet wide, a reproduction of the second-floor reception hall at the 14th-century Palazzo Davanzati in Florence. “The glass in the windows is actually from there,” Patty says, “and the shutters, at least the ironwork, are probably original.” That’s because in 1916, the year the ballroom was built, most of the palace’s contents were sold off; the McCloskeys found two of the original chairs at auction, and they now sit in the entryway. (The matching table is on view at the Frick Collection in New York.)
One significant divergence from the original, Patty says, is the floor, which was Portuguese tile. This one was once described as “the most beautiful dance floor in America,” a flawless plain of glossy teak joined by small, carved pieces of ebony, made without a single nail. It also boasts a hidden trapdoor (“For theatrical entrances!” quips Mark). The other whimsical detail: The ceiling beams are equipped with confetti boxes. “You pull the rope, and they dump confetti,” Mark says. “Mrs. Faust said that at Christmas parties, they’d put fans on the top of the mantelpiece and dump confetti so you’d have snowstorms.”
There are projects underway, too. For the last year, Eureka Forge has been restoring a set of exquisite iron gates, reproductions of the ones in front of Rome’s Cathedral of San Pietro in Vincoli, attributed to legendary blacksmith and designer Samuel Yellin. And then there’s the matter of the original stove…a very, very large stove.
“There’s a place in California that will restore it,” Patty says. “But we haven’t found anyone willing to carry it out of the basement!” Mark adds. “They need to get a crane down there,” Patty says with a sigh, “but they can’t quite yet figure out how to do that. Some things are just…difficult.”
But, as the McCloskeys have proved over and over again in the last three decades, difficult doesn’t mean insurmountable.
