The de Menils put the house - a long, flat-roofed, one-story building of brick, steel and glass - in the fashionable River Oaks neighborhood, with its antebellum mansions and Tudor-style houses with manicured lawns. It was designed by Johnson, then a 42-year-old disciple of Mies just starting his own practice while building his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut
.
One cabdriver saw the de Menils' windowless facade and asked, "What is this, a clinic?" Deliverymen pulled up to the front door, assuming it was the service entrance.
.
Even their own children had reservations. "I was very embarrassed," said Christophe de Menil, the oldest of the couple's five children. "It was just so different. And my sister Adelaide speaks of being too embarrassed to have friends over."
.
The de Menils' long, lean house is set at the end of a driveway that curves among towering oaks. The 5,500-square-foot house, with burnished black Mexican floor tiles, is built around a glassed-in courtyard, a feature the de Menils had seen in Venezuela. Now, seven years after Dominique de Menil's death and 31 years after her husband's, it has been returned to its original condition. The Menil Foundation completed an 18-month, $3.3 million restoration last month.
.
"You can feel how scrupulous the restoration has been," said the interior designer Andree Putman, who toured the house this spring. "This was such a delicate intervention. There is a grace to it, a magnificent simplicity. You have the feeling that Monsieur or Madame de Menil could appear at any minute to take their children to school."
.
Shortly after its completion, the de Menils began filling the house with one of the most important collections in the United States - a collection that eventually grew to 15,000, from Paleolithic bone carvings to Warhol soup cans. By the '60s, the de Menils had converted the garage into an office, where half a dozen registrars, curators and researchers tended to the collection. John de Menil, who ran the American division of Schlumberger Ltd., the oil services company founded by his wife's father, Conrad Schlumberger, spent evenings in his study cataloguing the collection, while Dominique de Menil worked from a card table in one of the five bedrooms. (Most of the artworks are now several miles away in the Menil Collection, a museum designed in 1987 by Renzo Piano.)
.
The de Menils were pleased enough with the austere lines of the house, but they rejected the interiors that Johnson proposed as too severe.
.
"Philip felt we should have a Mies van der Rohe settee, a Mies van der Rohe glass table and two Mies van der Rohe chairs on a little musty-colored rug," Dominique de Menil said two years before her death. "We wanted something more voluptuous." To punch up the interiors, they hired Charles James, an eccentric fashion designer who had created sculptural evening gowns for Mrs. de Menil.
.
James swept down from New York prepared to cause a little trouble. He took one look at the plans and insisted that the ceilings be raised 10 inches. He designed and built distinctive new furniture, including an oversize octagonal ottoman and a chaise longue in wrought iron and chartreuse silk.
.
In an audacious deviation from the white walls prescribed by devout Modernism, James anchored the living room with a striking gray wall and made the hallways vivid pink, crimson and tobacco.
.
By combining James's work with Johnson's, the de Menils subverted the pure, modern architecture with an exuberant, highly personal interior. In doing so, they humanized Modernism. They also infuriated their architect. For decades afterward, Johnson omitted the house from surveys of his work, even though de Menil patronage led to many commissions for him in Texas.
.
The de Menil house is a Modernist landmark with its own personality. "That French expression l'art de vivre - how the de Menils lived there, with their collection and all the furnishings - adds a layer to the house that makes it even more notable," said Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
.
For all its distinctive character, the house had serious design flaws. The flat roof leaked, requiring the de Menils to keep Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubrey, partners in a leading Houston design firm, on constant call to patch things up. "My first understanding of an architect was as the guy who fixed the roof," said François de Menil, the youngest son, who is an architect himself, in New York.
.
In returning the house to its early condition, Stern Bucek Architects produced 50 mechanical and architectural drawings, more than twice the number Johnson had drafted.
.
The restored house will not be open to the public. Instead, it will be used for special events and small museum gatherings.