Walton Residence - Bentonville Arkansas - Built: 1958 by MidCentArc Via Flickr: Architect: E. Fay Jones House won 1961 AIA Honor Award Photo: Maynard L. Parker Copyright: Huntington Library Photo Taken: April 1961 "In town, the Waltons preferred to keep a low profile. Take their home: Walton certainly could have afforded something as grand as William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon, but that wasn't his style. Back in 1958, mostly at Helen’s instigation, Sam had agreed to hire an architect to build the family a nice home. They bought a lot in a wooded area on the east end of town and hired a young architecture professor from the University of Arkansas, E. Fay jones, who had been a student of Frank Lloyd Wrights. Jones dammed a small stream that burbled through the property to create a reflecting pond and a waterfall and then designed a 5,800 square-foot house, made of Arkansas fìeldstone, glass, and cedar beams, that bordered the pond and waterfall. with a wing bridging the stream. The design, long and low, was elegant but unobtrusive. Jones remembers worrying that what he'd designed might be out of the couple’s reach; but Helen’s money paid for most of the $100,000* cost. That house burned down one night in April 1972, struck by a bolt of lightning during a spring storm. The Waltons, blasted out of bed by the boom, escaped unscathed, but most of the house was consumed before firemen could put out the blaze. Helen Walton called on Jones again. This time, with all the children grown and living away from home (Alice was in her senior year of college), she had him redesign and enlarge the house for entertaining. “lt had the same basic outlines," Jones said, "but they could afford nicer materials" not to mention central air-conditioning, an extravagance Sam Walton hadn't seen the need to spring for, the first time. As she had with the original house, Helen Walton took charge of working with Jones on the redesign. Sam Walton sat in occasionally. Mostly, as Jones recalls, "Sam would say, ‘Now Helen, do we really have to do this?' and say, 'Yes, Sam, we do.' " While the home was being built, the Waltons lived in a double-wide mobile home on the property." - Bob Ortega - In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and Wal-Mart, the World's Most Powerful Retailer *In 2010, that would be $750,000