Mary Rockwell Hook's Pink House

Mary Rockwell Hook, a pioneering Kansas City architect, designed several extravagant homes in Kansas City, including this structure in 1922. Known then as the "Pink House" this home in the Country Club District and near Kansas City's famed Ward Parkway is an example of Hook routinely drawing inspiration from her travels as she was intrigued by pink exteriors she saw in San Francisco during the 1915 World's Fair. Despite obstacles as a female architect in male-dominated the field, Hook gained a reputation as one of Kansas City's most innovative architects. She did most of her work in Kansas City early in her career, from roughly 1908 to 1927, and managed a rebuilding project in Paris after World War I, and she completed projects in other parts of the U.S. She spent the last fifteen years of her career (into her 70s) designing resorts and hotels in Florida; she lived past the age of 100.

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 both a mercantile business and a grain company and later became a bank president. Mary Hook was born in 1877, the middle child of five daughters. Bertrand's wealth allowed him to send his daughters to what he considered superior schools in the Northeast U.S. Mary Hook studied at Dana Hall, a girls' preparatory school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which led her to enroll at Wellesley College, which she attended from 1896 to 1900. 

The Rockwell family traveled to several locations worldwide, including Asia, the Pacific Islands, Canada, and the U.S., 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. 

She studied in Paris as the only female student, alongside seven other American men who did not think too kindly of her. Indeed, finding acceptance among her male peers proved exceptionally difficult. Nevertheless, 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 sex, but the second, a prominent firm — Howe, Hoit & Cutler — welcomed her. 

Two years later, in 1908, Hook began to design homes, mainly for Kansas City's wealthiest residents. The Pink House arose in 1922 at a time when Hook's architectural work began to slow down. At the tail end of World War I, from 1917-1918, Hook lived in New York, specifically 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 rebuilding hospitals and schools and organizing technical assistance programs for the district's farmers. 

In 1921, the year before building the Pink House, Hook (still Mary Rockwell at the time) returned from France and married Inghram D. Hook. In the early 1920s, the Rockwell and Hook families bought three adjacent home sites at the crest of a hillside serviced by a cul-de-sac drive. The Pink House was the first of the three sites constructed. Hook chose to use the pink plaster after seeing it at San Francisco's World's Fair in 1915. The Hooks lived in the house from 1924 to 1931. 

For much of the time the Hooks resided in the Pink House, 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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Coombs, Cathy. "A Stunning Eye-Catching Design Nicknamed ‘The Pink House’ Built In 1922 is Listed As a Historic Home." medium.com. November 14, 2022. https://medium.com/@cjcwriter04/a-stunning-eye-catching-design-nicknamed-the-pink-house-built-in-1922-is-listed-as-a-historic-f88994675c16.

"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. "Bertrand Rockwell House." Clio: Your Guide to History. June 13, 2024. https://theclio.com/entry/182735.

--- --- ---. "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.