Bertrand Rockwell House

Kansas City architect Mary Rockwell Hook designed numerous homes in this part of Kansas City, including this stately residence for her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bertrand Rockwell. Despite facing scrutiny from her male peers, Hook and other female Kansas City architects like Nelle Peters broke the "glass ceiling" and earned a reputation as one of the most innovative architects in the city. The house she designed for her parents was built between 1908 and 1909 in the Country Club District, one of several exclusive communities near or along Ward Parkway. Hook did most of her work in Kansas City early in her career while also leading a rebuilding project in Paris after World War I. Hook worked into her 70s, designing resorts and hotels in Florida.

Mary Rockwell Hook's father, Bertrand, left the Union Army after the Civil War in 1865 and settled near Fort Riley in Junction City, Kansas. He founded a mercantile company, a grain company, and then became a bank president. One of five daughters, Mary Hook was the middle child and was born 1877. Bertrand's wealth allowed him to send his daughters to what he considered superior schools in the Northeast. Mary Hook studied at Dana Hall, a girls' preparatory school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She later enrolled at Wellesley College, which she attended from 1896 to 1900.

After graduation, the Rockwell family traveled to numerous locations, such as the Philippines, Japan, Europe, eastern Canada, and New England, which allowed Mary to witness an array of architecture that inspired her to pursue a postgraduate architectural degree. In 1903, at the age of twenty-six, she spent the year studying in the architecture department of the Art Institute of Chicago. After a term teaching English in Puerto Rico and trips to Venezuela and Sicily, Mary Hook's second period of architectural instruction came in Paris in 1905 in an atelier préparatoire directed by a recent graduate of the lauded Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Mary Hook (still Rockwell at this point) studied in Paris as the only female student, alongside seven other American men. Sources indicate that her male peers excluded her, but she faced the gender bias head-on and returned from Paris with a mission to succeed as an architect. The first office to which Hook applied refused her because of her gender, but the second, a prominent firm — Howe, Hoit & Cutler — welcomed her.

Two years later, in 1908, Hook began to design homes, including the now-historic Bertrand Rockwell House in the Country Club District. Her first house, a bungalow, arose on a lot her father purchased for her. She followed that by designing a home for her oldest sister in Santa Rosa, California, and one in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Finally that year, she began work on the Bertrand Rockwell estate, which builders completed in 1909.

The historic home's location in the Country Club District alongside numerous other mansions in the Country Club District and along Ward Parkway speaks to the early-twentieth-century trend of Kansas City's wealthy moving southward away from the city center to exclusive (usually racially restricted) suburban-style communities. J.C. Nichols, a nationally recognized urban planner, designed the Country Club District community and several other developments south of the city, mainly catering to the wealthy. In 1907, the Nichols Investment Company purchased approximately 1,000 acres of land beyond the city limits that became the Country Club District, named for the nearby Kansas City Country Club. Along with Nichols' idea to bury the water and sewer lines, design roads that followed the terrain instead of using a grid pattern, develop cul-de-sacs, and provide extensive green space and landscaping, the communities included plenty of strategies, rules, and deed restrictions that prevented (or expressly forbade) people of color from living in the neighborhoods.

However, while the communities existed as racially restricted, several wealthy residents accepted the idea of hiring Hook, a woman, to design their homes at a time when men dominated the field. Extant records list only five female architects working in Kansas City from 1910 to 1930. Despite producing fewer works, Hook gained fame as one of Kansas City's most innovative architects. Nelle Peters, another female architect, also earned a considerable reputation. Peters designed Kansas City's Ambassador Hotel and numerous large apartment buildings in the Country Club District. She even designed the office building where Walt Disney established Laugh-O-Gram Studios.

Unlike Peters, who became more productive following a divorce, Mary Hook's architectural work slowed after World War I into the 1920s. At the tail end of World War I, from 1917-1918, Hook lived in New York's Greenwich Village and worked for a post office translating "Spanish trade mail." In the spring of 1920, Hook joined the American Committee for Devastated France, organized by the philanthropic daughter of J. P. Morgan, and traveled to an area of Paris destroyed during the war. Morgan selected Hook to supervise the rebuilding of hospitals and schools and organize technical assistance programs for the district's farmers.

When Hook (still Mary Rockwell at the time) returned from France around 1921, she married Inghram D. Hook. From 1924 until 1929, Hook maintained an architectural partnership with Eric Douglas MacWilliam Remington, who also studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Still, Hook began to split her time as she settled into the routine of an affluent, suburban wife and mom of two adopted sons, melding that role with that of a professional architect. In 1927, she completed her last Kansas City home when she designed the grand Four Gates Farm for her longtime friend Marvin Gates and his family, affluent Kansas City residents.

In 1935, at age 58, Hook purchased fifty-five acres of shore property on Siesta Key, south of Sarasota, Florida. She spent the next fifteen years (roughly) designing an informal resort hotel, two vacation homes, and a guest house. Finally, at around age 73, she decided to end her career. But Mary Rockwell Hook lived beyond the age of 100, dying in 1978 at age 101. 

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Dent, Mark. "The Man Who Made the Suburbs White." Slate.com. August 16, 2023. https://slate.com/business/2023/08/jc-nichols-covenants-segregation-development-zoning.html.

"Mary Rockwell Hook: Ahead of Her Time." Architectural Observer. July 16, 2018. https://architecturalobserver.com/mary-rockwell-hook-ahead-of-her-time/.

Piland, Sherry and Elaine Ryder. "Nomination Form: Residential Structures by Mary Hook." National Register of Historic Places. nps.gov. 1983. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/51eda1d5-081f-475f-8749-a775f2158c53.

Powers, Mathew and Clio Admin. "Four Gates Farm." Clio: Your Guide to History. January 29, 2022. https://theclio.com/entry/145381.

Reed, Linda. "Mary Rockwell Hook, Architect and Developer." The Architectress. lindareederwriter.com. Accessed June 12, 2024. https://www.lindareederwriter.com/blog/mary-rockwell-hook.

Stevens Sara. "J.C. Nichols and the Country Club District: Suburban Aesthetics and Property Values." The Pendergast Years. Kansas City Public Library. Accessed June 12, 2024.