Built in 1922-23, the Judge Gates residence is a pristine example of Prairie School residential design adapted to the small suburban house lot. It was designed by Clarence E Shepard, who enjoyed an extensive residential design practice In the Kansas City metropolitan area. The house is associated with Judge Louis Gates, who was remembered in Wyandotte County as "one of the great lawyers of his day."

The Gates residence is a relatively late example of Prairie School design. Architect Clarence Shepard had studied at the University of California beginning in 1895. He opened his office in Kansas City in 1907. During his active years as an architect, he designed more than six hundred homes in the Country Club and Mission Hills districts. These houses represent a wide range of the fashionable styles used during the period.

By the time Shepard designed the Gates house - more than five years after what H Alien Brooks has called the "climactic years" of Prairie School design - the character of Prairie School architecture was available to him as one of several possible design Idioms. The Gates house resembles Prairie School designs that began to appear after 1914 which Vincent Scully Has described as "more upstanding, cubical, somewhat more heavily closed and enclosing forms."

The Gates residence exhibits most of the visual characteristics Identified with the Prairie School: use of natural materials, precise angular forms, deep eaves and continuous horizontals punctuated by short verticals. The cross-axial plan around a fireplace mass and the Interwoven Interior spaces of the most Innovative Prairie School designs were also features of Shepard's plan for the Gates house.

Certainly, the Judge Gates house also imitates what Scully Identified as Frank Lloyd Wright's mastery of "the American grid and its rectangular plots." Like Wright, Shepard utilized features that make a home on a small lot private and compact without unnecessary complication or artifice. The side entrance also functions as a secluded porch. The garage is contained beneath the porch, making room at the rear of the house for a service yard.

When the house was completed in 1923, Louis Gates was serving in the legislature as a representative from Rosedale. He had received his law degree from the University of Michigan. Gates was admitted to the bar of Kansas, Missouri, and Michigan in 1910. After World War I, he opened an office In Kansas City, Kansas and "remained a sole practitioner during most of his active years as an attorney." The most notable achievements of Gates' career followed in the twenty years after construction of his home. From 1925 to 1929, he was the judge of City Court. Then he was Wyandotte County counsellor for a year. He was president of the Kansas City, Kansas Chamber of Commerce in 1931 and president of the local bar association in 1937. From 1938-1943, Gates was a referee in United States bankruptcy hearings. After his death, Gates was praised for his exemplary dedication to the legal profession and for his personal Integrity. - NRHP, 1 October 1980