When Henry Clay Frick built his 104-room house, Eagle Rock, in Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts, he insisted that the design “be kept as simple as possible” and that he didn’t care “whether it would be approved by Messrs. McKim, Mead, and White, Messrs. Carrère and Hastings, or Mrs. Edith Wharton.” Frick had been renting the former William Henry Vanderbilt mansion at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street when in 1912 he lent several major works from his collection to the inaugural exhibition at the new building of his longtime dealer, Knoedler & Company, at Fifth Avenue and 46th Street (the building later disastrously remodeled into the Philippine Center). The new gallery had been designed by Thomas Hastings—of Carrère and Hastings. (Carrère had died in an automobile accident.) Hastings was close to Charles Carstairs, the Knoedler representative who dealt with Frick.

The Vanderbilt house was only meant to serve Frick and his wife, Adelaide, as temporary quarters. They purchased the site of their future house, on Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st streets, from the New York Public Library. The Lenox Library, the outstanding private library of James Lenox, occupied the site in a building by Richard Morris Hunt. (The Municipal Art Society had erected the beautiful Richard Morris Hunt Memorial on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st streets so it would face one of Hunt’s most famous buildings.) The newly formed New York Public Library had purchased the Lenox Library, and as soon as the 42nd Street library building was completed, the Lenox contents were transported there. The sale to Frick required that he wait until the transportation had been completed before he could raze the library building. Coincidence, not condition, led to Frick’s hiring Thomas Hastings, architect of the New York Public Library, to design the new house. Frick finally razed the Lenox Library in the fall of 1912.

The story of the building and furnishing of the Frick house, of the acquisition of its collections, and of its becoming a public museum in 1935 is told with superb clarity, in a sumptuously illustrated volume, by Colin B. Bailey in “Building the Frick Collection: An Introduction to the House and Its Collections” (Scala Publishers, 128 pages, $24.95). Mr. Bailey is the Frick’s Chief Curator. The book is a must for anyone who thinks (as I do) that the Frick is one of the principal reasons for living in New York.

Hastings, as anyone can see, designed a splendid house. The asymmetrical massing around a generous lawn lent the house the gracious air of a country estate. Hastings was a master of the small detail that has a large impact, and Mr. Bailey insufficiently praises such elements of the design as the simple yet intricate surrounds of the deep-set windows of the second and third floors, the beautifully crafted balustrade running along the third floor of the main block and continuing as a parapet atop the two-story south wing, and the pair of large urns defining the north and south ends of the shallow staircase that leads from the French doors of the main block to the front lawn.

Frick was not pleased, however, with Hastings’s plans for the interior decoration, and brought in Sir Charles Allom to decorate the “public” rooms of the first floor. Allom and Frick agreed that the decoration must serve, not compete with, the artworks. They spoke of the need for simplicity, and for reducing ornamentation. Their specifications make you think of minimalist galleries. Yet look at the rooms, and you realize that “simplicity” was a complicated matter, and meant something more like “appropriateness” as that word was used by Edith Wharton and the decorator Elsie de Wolfe.

The Frick is our outstanding object lesson in how paneling, moldings, and fine materials enhance our appreciation of artworks (just as do elaborate frames) in a way minimalist spaces, like the ones at the Museum of Modern Art or the ones designed by Renzo Piano at the Morgan Library, do not. Speaking of Elsie de Wolfe, she lobbied hard to get work on the Frick house, and Frick hired her to decorate the private rooms on the second and third floors. In time, Frick came to rely upon her and her judgment more than he did on either Hastings or Allom.

Fatefully, J.P. Morgan, America’s greatest art collector, died in 1913, just as Frick was giving thought to furnishing the house. In 1914–16 the Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition — described by Mr. Bailey as the “first blockbuster” — of 4,100 works from Morgan’s collection. Most of those works were then sold through Frick’s dealer, Joseph Duveen. In his last years, Frick bought an extraordinary number of paintings and decorative artworks from Duveen. Duveen, as Mr. Bailey shows, awakened Frick to an intense interest in decorative arts — Limoges enamels, Renaissance bronzes, and 18th-century furniture.

Frick died in 1919 but had provided for his house and collection to become a public museum. Adelaide Frick died in 1931, and immediately work began on transforming the house into a public museum. By then Hastings had died. John Russell Pope became the Frick Collection’s architect. A good deal of what we most admire about the building today, especially the Garden Court with its lovely fountain, is the work of Pope. The museum opened at the end of 1935.

In 1977, an addition was placed on the east end of the building off 70th Street. Designed by John Barrington Bayley, the learned advocate of contemporary classicism, the addition was unstintingly classical in design and executed to a standard of refined traditional workmanship that modernists had claimed was no longer attainable. Mr. Bailey mentions this addition, of course. But he does not tell us why the Frick chose to buck the trends and commission a classical design. And then you begin to get a little nervous.

The Frick sometimes seems the last bastion of high seriousness in New York, immune to the trends that have destroyed so many other museums. What if the Frick were to expand again? What kind of design would it commission? What would happen if they hired Renzo Piano, or Norman Foster? Certainly, the Frick would no longer be the Frick, and some of us would have one fewer reason — a big one — to live in New York. Thus far, the Frick — and the Met under Philippe de Montebello — have stayed the course, and not caved into ill-conceived trends. Long may they hold out.

fmorrone@nysun.com