The Menil Collection history

In April 1964, at Houston’s University of St Thomas, Dominique and John delivered a talk they called “The Delight and the Dilemma of Collecting.”

Dominique and John de Menil, 1967, pictured with Seated Figure, Mali, Dogon.

After John’s death, in 1973, Dominique set out to build the museum they had envisioned.

Completed in 1987, this corner of Houston was the magnum opus of one unconventional, hugely influential Houston couple: John and Dominique de Menil.

The townhouse was the family’s base in Manhattan until 1996, when it was sold by Dominique and incorporated into the Buckley School next door.

Dominique remained graciously self-effacing until she died at age 89 on the last day of 1997.

But in January 1998, back at the house for a reception that followed Dominique’s funeral, he cast an approving eye around the salon. “And she didn’t change a thing for 50 years,” Johnson said. “It’s like Balenciaga in here: She knew she had something that was perfect.”

In 2009, David Chipperfield Architects was engaged to create a new master plan for the Menil campus.

The first projects to result in this plan were Stern and Bucek’s Bistro Menil and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates’ gateway landscape and parking lot, all completed in 2014.