A narrow five-story front of white glazed terra cotta in a light Gothic dress. Paneled piers at either side rise past the roofline to small pinnacles, and each upper floor is a band of three windows divided by slender mullions. Below every band runs a spandrel of blind pointed arches, and a parapet of the same arches finishes the top. At street level, leafy terra-cotta brackets hold up a storefront of dark carved wood, its stained-glass panels worked in a stylized floral pattern, with the number 1112 etched in the glass over the door and an ornate metal mailbox beside it. A green copper hood shelters the sign band lettered COSMOPOLITAN. High on the west wall, above its two-story neighbor, a faded painted sign still reads CLARK PEEPER OFFICE FURNITURE DECORATING.
The narrow lot at 1112 Olive held a three-story printing shop in 1909. The present five-story building, about twenty feet wide behind a white terra-cotta front, went up after that; its date and architect are not yet known. The National Cash Register Company, which left its 1913 sales and repair building at 1011 Olive in 1933, had its St. Louis office here by 1935. In 1948 the Clark-Peeper Company, an office furniture dealer, bought the building it had been renting for several years and filled all five floors, and Clark-Peeper was still at 1112 Olive in 2000. The interior was later remade with Gothic-style rooms, and the building now carries the name Cosmopolitan over its storefront.
