Sold for $3.25 million, the late Henry Bloch’s Mission Hills home may be demolished
Fronted by six stately white columns, it’s the Mission Hills mansion where Kansas City business tycoon and philanthropist Henry Bloch lived for more than 50 years.
Now, the 7,472-square foot home — featuring pool, sauna, tennis court and an advanced heating, cooling and dehumidifying system that helped keep safe Henry and Marion Bloch’s priceless collection of Impressionist art — may soon be torn down.
On Tuesday, Adam and Jill Gray, who in October 2019 purchased Bloch’s former residence at 6400 Wenonga Terrace for $3.25 million, placed a request before the town’s Architectural Review Board to build a new home and pool on the property.
The couple’s plan, which has already been recommended for approval by the city’s Professional Review Panel, does not call for building a massive new house where the the current home sits. In some respects, the house would be smaller.
“The Grays,” the agenda reads, “are proposing a new 1 1/2 story home with a 6,041 sq. ft. footprint.”
That would include a 4,146-square-foot first floor, a 1,200-square-foot three-car garage, 680 square feet of covered porches and patios, a 336-square-foot outdoor dining pavilion and a 160-square-foot covered spa. A swimming pool and auto-court driveway are part of the project.
The Star on Tuesday could not immediately reach the Grays nor Timothy Woofter, the chair of the review board and a vice president with the the architectural firm Gould Evans.
Jill Clifton, the city planner for Mission Hills, said that, depending on the types of amenities one wants, it is not uncommon for it to be less expensive to raze an old house and rebuild than to try to renovate or restore a multi-million dollar home.
Many of the older homes in Mission Hills were built with stone basements that may now leak, or with kitchens, closest and rooms that are smaller than what many homeowners now find appealing.
The Blochs built the colonial home in 1963. Marion Bloch died in 2013, and Henry Bloch, the co-founder of H&R Block, died in April 2019 at age 96.
Their home was originally put up for sale in September 2019 for $4.6 million.
The Bloch home is hardly the first in the wealthy community to be valued in the millions of dollars and razed so that a new home could be built. Records supplied by the city of Mission Hills show that since February 2015 , 29 homes were demolished, including two others nearby on Wenonga Terrace.
Bloch’s former residence is one of six Mission Hills homes this year whose owners sought permission for demolition.
Bloch and his younger brother, Richard, who died in 2004, started H&R Block in 1955, substituting a “K” for an “H” so the pronunciation was clear. Henry Bloch marshaled his fortune and influence with his namesake foundation to create the H&R Block headquarters downtown and the Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
And he was the philanthropic force behind the glass “lenses” that are the Bloch Building at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In 2015, Bloch gave the Nelson-Atkins 29 of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings that hung in his home.
In 2009, his brother Richard Bloch’s mansion at 6315 Ward Parkway, on the east side of the boulevard just north of Meyer Circle, was also purchased and razed.
No new home was built. The property remains an empty parcel.
This story was originally published December 15, 2020 at 5:20 PM.
