From the street, the Umbrella House can play a little trick on the uninitiated.

If you are driving toward Longboat Key from Lido Key, you might glimpse only the top of its canopy rising above a wall, a crisp modernist shape that appears and disappears in seconds. It doesn’t announce itself as one of the most important houses in Sarasota, or as a building that helped define an entire architectural movement. Anne Essner, the board chair of Architecture Sarasota who owns the home with her husband, Robert “Bob” Essner, says she still hears the same confession from first-time visitors.

“They drive by on the way to Longboat Key, and they see this thing, and they don’t know what it is,” Essner says. “And as they start hearing the story, and they’re in the building, most of the time people’s imaginations really are captured.”

This winter, the Umbrella House will receive a new kind of international recognition, one created specifically because modernist homes like it are disappearing. Anne and Bob Essner have been selected to receive the inaugural Stewardship Award for Modernist Homes, presented by the World Monuments Fund (WMF).

The distinction was launched in 2026 to spotlight exemplary conservation work at modernist residences and to recognize homeowners whose thoughtful restoration preserves a house’s architectural and historic value while ensuring it remains a viable place to live. The WMF says modernist homes face acute threats to their survival, from deterioration to developer pressure. The stewardship award grew out of WMF’s Modernism Program and complements the World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize, which honors outstanding conservation of modernist public buildings. The Umbrella House is the inaugural Stewardship Award recipient.

Marty Hylton, president of Architecture Sarasota, says the significance is not simply that the house is famous, but that the award reframes who preservation is really about.

“[Awards] usually honor the architect,” Hylton says. “In this case, they’re honoring the owners. They felt like people who choose to steward and use their time and resources and energy to save—and restore—was deserving of its own recognition.”

The Umbrella House is one of the most iconic works of the Sarasota School of Architecture and a landmark of climate-responsive modern design, and its continued integrity reflects not only the Essners’ leadership but also “the respect and restraint shown by previous owners, who preserved the home’s architecture and interior finishes without compromising Rudolph’s original vision,” Hylton adds.

That lineage of care matters because the Umbrella House sits at the center of Sarasota’s architectural identity. Sarasota is internationally known for the Sarasota School of Architecture, a postwar movement that favored buildings shaped by climate, light and landscape. Its architects pursued passive cooling, cross-ventilation, deep overhangs, locally sourced materials and simple open plans that supported a more casual way of living in subtropical Florida. The Umbrella House embodies those ideas in their purest residential form.

Its neighborhood, Lido Shores, was developed around 1950 by Philip Hanson Hiss, who moved to Sarasota in 1948 from New York City and Connecticut. Hiss commissioned the Umbrella House in 1953 as a spec house, not designed for a particular owner. He placed it along a prominent curve traveled by people going to and from Longboat Key from Lido Key, using architecture as a form of advertisement for his modern vision. Next door, Hiss built what is now known as the Hiss Studio, a private residence he designed and used as his office while developing the neighborhood.

The architect, Paul Rudolph, incorporated unique adaptations to the tropical climate, including the house’s namesake umbrella—a two-story sunshade designed to modulate light and heat.

When the Umbrella House opened in 1953, it received significant attention in architectural periodicals of the time. “When they opened [the house], 3,000 people went through in about 48 hours,” Hylton says. “They had to have a second open house weekend because so many people came.”

Visitors today still respond with a kind of disbelief, Hylton says, not only because the house is from 1953, but because it doesn’t feel dated, even more than 70 years later.

“It seems so contemporary,” he says. “Even by today’s standards.”

The house is modest in size, but visitors often describe it as a jewel box, Hylton says, simple on the outside and unexpectedly rich inside. Much of its integrity remains intact, from original flooring and cabinetry to windows and bathrooms, a rarity for a coastal house of its era.

A hurricane destroyed the original umbrella in the early 1960s, and it was only ever partially reconstructed. For decades, the house existed without its defining feature. But that absence is what makes the Essners’ work especially significant.

In 2015, the couple completed a restoration of the house and an award-winning reconstruction of the umbrella, returning the building’s most recognizable element to the skyline and aligning the structure with contemporary building codes while remaining faithful to Rudolph’s design intent.

Essner says she and her husband never set out to become preservationists. They moved to Sarasota for the arts and a winter base after Bob, the former chairman and CEO of the pharamaceutical company Wyeth, retired. The couple's immersion in modern architecture happened gradually and almost accidentally.

“We had no sense of any of this when we moved here,” Essner says. “But as we got to know the houses, we just loved all of it.”

Before the Essners purchased the Umbrella House, the previous owners had begun restoration work and were working with preservation architect Greg Hall. When the Essners learned the property might be sold, they agreed on one non-negotiable condition: “Bob and I both agreed that we weren’t going to buy it if the city wouldn’t let us put the structure back on,” Essner says.

They went to the planning department, she says, and found support. The permit window was tight. They ordered materials, including custom aluminum extruded uprights for the umbrella, before final approvals were in hand.

“It was a bit of a leap of faith that it would all work out,” Essner says.

The reconstruction involved compromise. They replaced the umbrella’s deteriorating cypress slats with a composite alternative and used aluminum uprights to meet modern code.

“I do believe that if the cost of maintaining a house like this gets to be a total money pit, people will stop wanting to have them, and they won’t survive,” Essner says. “So we made a decision that it made economic sense to use a material that 15 feet up, you will never know.”

The award arrives at a moment when Sarasota’s modernist houses face more pressure. Hylton points to recent flooding at other Sarasota School structures  and to the uncertainty surrounding properties like the Victor Lundy house, where a demolition permit was pursued after assurances of preservation.

Climate change presents an even larger unknown. The Umbrella House itself was spared during Hurricane Milton, Essner says, though she expected to return to severe damage. The umbrella structure did tilt slightly, prompting a structural review and new conversations about bracing, cables and future standards. “I expected to come back and find just a totally wrecked Umbrella House,” she says. “Bless its little heart, it was just fine.”

Looking ahead, Hylton says Architecture Sarasota is working with partners to develop a conservation management plan for the site, documenting its history, assessing current conditions and outlining long-term strategies for conservation, sustainability and appropriate use.

He envisions the Umbrella House as a kind of living laboratory for modern preservation.

“I think looking at its future as this idea of a site for almost like a laboratory for conserving modern architecture, but through the lens, maybe, of sustainability and resilience,” Hylton says. “The Sarasota School focused on those things. They just didn’t use those terms.”

Essner and her husband, whose main residence is also in Lido Shores, keep the house accessible through Architecture Sarasota tours and nonprofit events.

“We’ve tried to share all of this with the community,” she says. “It’s not just that it looks good, or isn’t it pretty, but more so that people get to experience it.”

For Sarasota, the honor functions as both recognition and warning: the world is paying attention to this architecture, and survival is no longer guaranteed.

“It’s a great second act,” Essner says.