When Richard Manoogian took charge of Masco Corporation, the Detroit-area manufacturer his father had built around a single patented faucet valve was posting about $55 million a year in sales. By the time Manoogian stepped back from its helm, that figure topped $8 billion. Manoogian, who spent nearly five decades reshaping his family's hardware company into one of the country's largest home improvement and building products manufacturers, and who became one of Detroit's most consequential collectors of American art, died on September 25, 2026, at the age of 90.

He was born in 1936, the son of Alex and Marie Manoogian. Alex, an Armenian immigrant born in Smyrna, in present-day Turkey, had founded the company in Detroit in 1929 and later invented the single-handle Delta faucet that became its signature product. Richard studied economics at Yale University before joining the family business in 1958, when it was still known mainly as a maker of fasteners and hardware components.

Masco's board elected him a director in 1964, made him president and chief operating officer in 1968, and named him chairman and chief executive officer in 1985, positions his father had held before him. Across the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Manoogian directed more than 100 acquisitions that carried Masco far beyond its original hardware lines into faucets, cabinetry, and other home improvement products sold under dozens of brand names, turning it into a global supplier to homebuilders and remodelers. He led the company for twenty-two years as chief executive, telling The Detroit News in 2007 that "after 50 years, we probably should have a little turnover" as he handed the role to a successor and became executive chairman. In all, Manoogian spent fifty-six years on Masco's board, twenty-seven of them as chairman, before the company named him chairman emeritus in 2012, according to Masco Corporation.

A second pursuit ran alongside the one at Masco. Manoogian became a trustee of the Detroit Institute of Arts in the 1970s and began assembling a collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century American paintings that grew into one of the most significant held privately in the country. In 1989 the National Gallery of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts organized "American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection," sixty-three works that traveled from Washington to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and finally to Detroit, The Christian Science Monitor reported at the time. Discussing George Caleb Bingham's "The Jolly Flatboatmen," one of the collection's centerpieces, Manoogian told the paper, "I don't think there's any painting more than 'The Jolly Flatboatmen' that reflects the expansion and enthusiasm that was taking place in the country at that time." Asked whether the painting, then on long-term loan to the National Gallery, might eventually remain there for good, he answered only, "It wouldn't surprise me if it ended up here. It wouldn't surprise me."

He and his wife, Jane Manoogian, built the collection together and later established the Richard and Jane Manoogian Foundation. Manoogian also served more than twenty-five years on the Mackinac Island State Park Commission, appointed in turn by Governors John Engler, Jennifer Granholm and Rick Snyder, and was a director of Ford Motor Company from 2001 to 2014. He made his home in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan.

"There are not enough words to adequately recognize the lifelong accomplishments, contributions and impact of Richard Manoogian," said Jon Nudi, Masco's president and chief executive, in a statement carried by The Armenian Mirror-Spectator after his death. "His integrity, his commitment to excellence and respect and care for each person will forever be a part of Masco."

In lieu of flowers, his family asked that donations go to the AGBU Alex and Marie Manoogian School, St. John's Armenian Church, and the Richard and Jane Manoogian Fund for Conservation and Preservation of Open Spaces at the Mackinac Island Community Foundation, The Joplin Globe reported.

The company Alex Manoogian started with a single faucet design now sells home and building products under dozens of brand names, built in large part through the run of acquisitions his son pursued across three decades at its head. The paintings Richard and Jane Manoogian gathered still travel between the Detroit Institute of Arts and museums around the country, more than three decades after their first joint tour introduced the collection to the public. The foundation he led continues to support the Armenian school and church his parents helped establish and the conservation of open land on Mackinac Island, the same causes he asked mourners to give to in his name.