Charles and Rebecca invite you to join them

A $1B+ collection is already committed. Now we are inviting founding partners to help open it to the world.

The collection is here. The museum vision is designed. The conviction has been fifty years in the making. What remains is the land, the structure, and the partners willing to stand at the founding of a once-in-a-generation cultural institution.

Charles Trois has spent more than fifty years proving that an extraordinary idea can be made real. A Philadelphia-born artist, musician, and self-taught builder, he first stepped into the spotlight as a guitarist with The Soul Survivors, whose hit “Expressway to Your Heart” helped define an era. He later joined the team at Super K Productions, the legendary New York production house behind more than fifty hit records. In 1969, Charles left the stage and committed himself to a life of painting, sculpture, architecture, and building on a monumental scale.

Charles builds from vision rather than convention, working in enduring materials — stone, iron, brick, and wood. His body of work includes a utopian art center in Vermont, the surrealist Feed Mill in Johnson City, and a “Modern Mayan” stone house outside Austin that earned a seven-page feature in the September 1990 issue of Architectural Digest. That vision reached its fullest expression in the Trois Estate: a thirteen-structure, village-scale compound carved into the granite of the Texas Hill Country. Part home, part work of art, and part small town, the estate is an architectural masterpiece built as a world unto itself — tangible proof of Charles’s ability to carry a seemingly impossible idea all the way into stone.

Alongside his artistic life, Charles built a formidable career in real estate, closing more than three hundred transactions in some years. He turned that success into the means to pursue his deepest conviction: that the objects through which humanity remembers itself must be gathered, protected, and ultimately shared. The result is a private collection of art, antiquities, and historic arms numbering nearly one million pieces — one of the most expansive personal collections ever assembled. The Trois Museum is not a departure from his life’s work. It is the scale toward which that work has always been moving.

Rebecca Trois has been Charles’s partner in every sense of the word: a trusted voice, a clear-eyed source of judgment, and the steady presence behind a life defined by ambitious ideas. She brings an uncommon ability to understand people, recognize what matters, and keep the human purpose of the work in view. Where Charles sees what might be built, Rebecca helps ensure that what is built has meaning, coherence, and a place for others within it.

Her contribution is not simply support; it is leadership expressed through constancy, discernment, and trust. Together, Charles and Rebecca have raised five children, sustained a family through decades of risk and creation, and built a life in which art, enterprise, and responsibility to one another remain inseparable. Their family is their proudest achievement and the foundation beneath every larger vision they have pursued.

The Trois Estate stands as the clearest physical expression of their partnership. Its thirteen structures form a village in the Texas Hill Country — Mayan and Mediterranean in influence, yet unmistakably their own. Charles gave the estate its daring architectural language; Rebecca helped give it the warmth, continuity, and sense of belonging that turned a remarkable place into a family home.

Now Charles and Rebecca — together with their family and the partners they have begun to gather around them — are setting their sights on their most ambitious dream yet: The Museum of the History of the World, a 400,000-square-foot living monument designed to house their nearly one-million-piece collection and tell the story of human civilization under one extraordinary roof.

It is the culmination of a lifetime of art, enterprise, craftsmanship, partnership, and family — and they are inviting you to help carry that legacy into the future.