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…