Albert Barnes’ home in Lower Merion is getting a new resident that appreciates its history

The property off Lapsley Lane in Lower Merion is best known as the longtime site of the original museum housing Albert C. Barnes’ legendary collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern art. Also notable is the surrounding 12-acre arboretum chock-full of woody and herbaceous plants, many of them rare.

Lesser known was Barnes’ private home, empty for many years but now becoming the new headquarters of the Lower Merion Conservancy, an advocacy group for the township’s historical and environmental resources.

Maurine McGeehan, the conservancy’s executive director, describes the organization’s new home as “like a time capsule.”

The conservancy’s former headquarters, which it will retain, is an isolated cottage in Rolling Hill Park in Gladwyne.

Barnes contracted French architect Paul Philippe Cret in 1922 to design a gallery and the adjoining residence in Merion and lived there until his death in 1951 in a car accident. In the Philadelphia area, Cret also was known for co-designing the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, including the Rodin Museum, and collaborating on the Ben Franklin Bridge. Other local projects include the Memorial Arch at Valley Forge and Rittenhouse Square.

Laura Barnes, Albert’s wife, remained in the Lower Merion home until her death in 1966, tending to the arboretum and cultivating a passion for plants as intense — if less well-known — as her husband’s passion for art.

McGeehan and Kathleen Abplanalp, the conservancy’s director of historic preservation, say it is rare to find a residence like the Barneses’ from that period where no one has lived for a half-century.

“So little has been modified,” said Abplanalp, whose office was once a servant’s bedroom.

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The conservancy, started in 1995, describes its mission this way: “Protects and enhances our community’s character and quality of life, recognizing that the sustainable management of our environmental and historic resources is inextricably intertwined with both conservation and change.”

It is well-known to the public by its annual list of endangered resources and offers numerous environmental education programs, as well as helping to preserve undeveloped land through conservation easements.

The Gladwyne cottage “served us well for over 20 years,” McGeehan said. While the group will continue to hold some functions there, she said, it wanted a more visible location, so it could play a more prominent role in the community.

There were also maintenance and logistical issues. The entrance is at the head of a steep, winding road off Rose Glen Road, and aging Norway maples often take down power lines. The roof of the cottage, built in 1896 for a farm caretaker, was replaced by the conservancy in 2013, but requires ongoing maintenance. There have been leaks and mold problems in the past, and internet connectivity is spotty.

When the conservancy board started to look for a new location in 2018, it had one basic requirement: The new headquarters had to be a place of historic significance. No architectural plain vanilla.

Most of the places the board looked at were too small or unaffordable, McGeehan said. One possible exception was the Barnes residence on Lapsley Lane.

St. Joseph’s University had agreed in 2018 to lease the Lower Merion complex from the Barnes Foundation, and Michael McCann, head of the biology department at St. Joseph’s and a member of the conservancy board, noted that with the move of the Barnes collection and administrative offices to the Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, there was no final designated use for the building.

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An Italian Renaissance building, it had more than ample space — roughly 5,000 square feet — and seven bedrooms and four bathrooms on the second floor.

The first floor had a kitchen, pantry, and office, plus a sitting room, living room, dining room, sun porch and two bathrooms.

The building had also been recently listed as a “Class I Resource” by Lower Merion Township, a mark of distinction in historic preservation circles.

St. Joseph’s declined to allow exterior photos to be taken of the building, citing continued construction underway and the fact that the university’s development of the site is a work in progress, including a university art museum planned to open in 2023.

The interior “is actually fairly modest in its size and in its design,” Abplanalp said. The fixtures “were higher end, but not custom. "

The Barneses didn’t seem concerned with setting interior design trends, she said, but the trend of the time was away from the ornate interior design of the Victorian era: “By the 1920s, you see cleaner lines, a simpler design.” The bathrooms and kitchen, she said, were particularly in line with what one might find in other houses of that era.

Perusing catalogs of home furnishings in the 1920s and 1930s, Abplanalp found many of the items in the residence: toilets, sinks, stoves, and a servants’ call system.

Some of the companies, including Haines, Jones, Cadbury, remain active today.

“It’s just so unusual, so intact,” Abplanalp said, noting that the move, which started in June, won’t be completed for some time. The house is “still a bit of a shell.”