Magic Chef Headquarters

Magic Chef Headquarters is a large modernist block whose tall corner tower and upper walls are red-brown brick — planar and nearly windowless, broken only by narrow recessed slots and bands of glass block. The lower front has been sheathed by its current tenant in ribbed metal panels laid in a pale harlequin pattern, banded in red and carrying applied signage above a row of red roll-up storage doors. Deep-set entrances are cut into the brick at the base.

Harris Armstrong designed this building in 1947 as the national headquarters of the American Stove Company, maker of Magic Chef gas ranges, whose factory stood a few blocks away on Kingshighway. For the lobby and showroom Isamu Noguchi was commissioned to create a sculptural relief ceiling — one of three "lunar landscape" ceilings and the only one that survives. The American Stove Company took the Magic Chef name in 1951. After the company left, the building housed the St. Louis Labor Health Institute, then stood vacant for roughly a decade. U-Haul bought the property in 1977 and converted it to a moving and storage center, encasing much of Armstrong's facade in metal panels; the Noguchi ceiling was restored and repainted in 2016.