Utopia – Studio of St. Albans

St. Louis architect Theodore Carl Link, designer of Union Station, and an architect of the 1904 Worlds Fair was asked to create for the Oscar Johnson family a retreat in the charmed valley of St. Albans, a home to become known as the Studio. So impressed by the beauty of the country there Link invited female members of the St Louis Artist’s Guild and built himself a cottage perched on the edge of the bluffs overlooking the Missouri River in 1909, the ruins still visible today. (The opinions of the original German settlers of the valley to this utopian society and its adherents went unrecorded.)