A narrow five-story commercial building — barely a single articulated bay wide — in subdued Romanesque Revival, its upper floors faced almost entirely in red brick. Brick piers frame the tall windows of the middle stories, and the top floor is crowned by three round-arched windows beneath a corbelled brick cornice. The ground floor, rebuilt in 1985, is a stone-faced storefront of three round arches with fanlight transoms, a red Greek-key frieze, and a bronze "1007 Olive Street" tablet. With the two buildings that once stood to the east cleared for a parking lot, the tall brick party wall now rises fully exposed.
The building went up in 1890, one of the narrow brick lofts lining the 1000 block of Olive Street, then the heart of St. Louis's music trade — a dense row of piano dealers and sheet-music houses that ran along Olive between Ninth and Twelfth Streets from the early 1880s, shaped by the city's German immigrant culture. The Kieselhorst Piano Company moved in around 1905–06. The firm had been founded in 1879 by John A. Kieselhorst, a German immigrant, and passed to his son Edwin Artus Kieselhorst after the founder's death in 1895. Edwin relocated the headquarters to 1007 Olive when the company's former corner at Olive and Tenth was cleared, and broadened the business from pianos into player pianos and Victor talking machines. Kieselhorst sold instruments here until 1930, when the firm closed as the piano gave way to radio and the phonograph in American homes. A 1985 remodeling replaced the original storefront with the present stone-faced, Postmodern ground floor, while the upper floors survive largely intact. The building now holds offices. In 2008 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the few surviving remnants of the Olive Street music district.
