Originals

(11/05/09) I recently found two more interior photographs and a little more information about when and why they were taken. Gutnayer put his house on the market in 1973, and these photos were the interior shots from the sales materials (which look like old test results from elementary school: how marketing has changed!). He wrote a letter to the agent cancelling their agreement around selling the house because they could not get an offer at their asking price ($156,000). Lucky for us, I think. So below I have added the other two interior views. Don't miss the huge paintings in the dining room. I will try to identify them from his art inventories.
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I got a request for more images, so here they are. We are working on making our architect choice and I am meeting with landscape architects: gotta plant some new trees to replace the cottonwood tree cover that came out. The operative word for our house with the designers has become 'tree house'. Also news on getting the house local landmark status will be coming up: I am starting discussions with a local historian who does those requests.

Here are some images of how the interior and exterior of the house looked in the 50s. And a photo of Gutnayer's immigration card.

J. Marion. DP stands for Displaced Person.

early view of the house.

That window is 40 feet long. I want to expose it all, but we will see what the architects think. Right now it is broken up by some bookcases (that might be bearing some structural weight!) and a maid's room. You can also see the original roof garden structure which is no longer there.

 

interior looking west.

 

interior now.

Paintings on the wall to the right are Courbet and the like.

African art all over as well. Couch and coffee table remain.

View to the east. 'Structural' bookshelf to the right.

 

that same spot now. So much wood, and so many different kinds!

interior, dining room. Table and chairs are still here.

I'm hoping to find a buyer for them somehow, someway.

master bedroom.

that crazy growth to the left of the door?
who knows...must be a sculpture because it is no longer there.
Can you imagine sleeping with that figure looking at you?
I wonder if they had a name for her.

Some visitors seem mildly icked out by the master bedroom opening on the living room, and there is inevitably an uncomfortable joke made about the evening's entertainment! I think I spent enough time in unconventional houses as a kid (those 70's treehouses in Marin and Sea Ranch come to mind) that I am not phased by this layout. The bedroom will be a great art gallery, because all it can really have in it is the bed. The wall to the right inside the bedroom has a picture rail: I hope we keep it as an artwall.

The Big Prize

So we picked the house first, not as much the neighborhood. It is on a busy street with a very public face, but it is also just a few minutes walk to the beach. We spent many days in September going to the beach after school and walking Sadie there before school. The beaches on the great Northern Sea remind me of California, minus the salt. On a warm still day, the Mediterranean. On a windy day with surf, CA. As a biased coastal girl, I had no idea the beach would be this, well, true beach.  My friends in HI and CA will scoff, but really, it is lovely. And on a still morning in September, when you think you could wade in with your clothes on, take a swim, and then walk home, it is pretty wonderful. I have big plans for our first summer here. I hope you are coming to visit.

The weather is cooling off rapidly: Im stocking up on smartwool for everyone and unpacking the winter coats. I am posting these so I can scroll back and visit them when it is freezing here in February.

walking to the beach from the road

Seriously? THIS is the beach near our house?

I couldn't believe it.

Looking south toward Wilmette's main beach

and the sailing beach, where Ella's friend Gretchen
hangs out all summer. We had fun swimming with her in the lake.

Homage to Dappled Light

So Reed was a little sad when he came home and saw the stark reality of the treeless backyard. So here are some images of how the screen porch felt before the tree came down, when it was wrapped in ivy and getting filtered light through the trees.

And here is a picture of the backyard with the tree in full force.
You can see the current naked backyard in the earlier post "a backside only a mother could love".

I am working on planning some screening trees: we had a beautiful katsura tree at our house in Seattle, so we will put some of those in, and, if they are good trees for the site, quaking aspens along the north edge of the house.

Wood

Unfortunately the cottonwood is too rotted to save any for building something. Our tree guy offered to save us some wood from other jobs to build things in the house. It got me thinking about the possibilities...There are many wood details in the house, from cheap pressboard wood paneling to beautiful custom paneling. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The pickled ceiling meets the 1/4" paneling detail

Wood paneling, wood flooring, and wood kitchen table

I think none of these kitchen elements will remain, but I love the subtlety of the color and grain changes with all that blond wood in one place.

Alice and J. Marion

Reed and I have put our hands on every piece of paper and every book in the house, as well as every hanger, sweater, jacket, hat and old magazine that was left here. We've sifted through so much material. As we do so we clear the house from this

To something more like this:

We've kept a lot of their older furniture, a piano, some jewelry, and lots of books. Depending on what the local historical societies and libraries decide, we may also be deciding what to do with J.Marion's copious drawings and documentation of his projects on the North Shore.

Here's some of what we know so far about them. He was a Polish Holocaust survivor, and there are many papers in his materials about the efforts to return stolen artworks to Jews after World War 2. He studied in the Ecole des Beaux Arts and had an architecture studio in France with his brother Henry. They did a number of interesting projects in France, including working on a house for Jacques Lipschitz in LeCorbusier's studio. He also designed a house and studio for the painter Robert Helman in Paris. After the war it appears that he worked in Poland doing reconstruction, and then came to the US in 1945 as a Displaced Person. He worked in New York with his brother Henry, then was offered a job at the University of Illinois at Chicago as their first architecture faculty. He taught at the Navy Pier. A number of prominent local architects came out of the program while he was there. He left the UIC in the mid 50s and must have at that point moved out to the suburbs to practice. In the early 50s he did a wide range of projects: many single family houses on the North Shore and in Chicago, a motel, highrises on Lakeshore Drive, Marine Drive and Sheridan Road in Chicago, and a series of commercial designs for a builder called NAMCO in Evanston. His work seems to have evolved from avant garde to 'builder vernacular' (as the architectural historian who came to look at the work gently put it) as he practiced through til the 90s. Alice, his wife, was a French teacher at New Trier High School and led abroad programs to France. Vive Alice! I have a number of her pieces of jewelry that were left in the house, mostly modern mexican silber. They were serious art collectors: J. Marion's family in Europe had quite a collection and he bought and sold many pieces. They seem to have really enjoyed going to auctions and there are many many catalogs from auction houses, all carefully marked up with sale prices. More on their collecting and their house in a future post: cooking dinner calls.

A backside only a mother could love

I am hoping the architects come up with something wonderful for this rear facade. There is talk of connecting down to the garden from the back somehow.  The intersection of the brick volume and the main house volume is so odd. But the screen porch above my studio (the two parts of the brick piece) feels wonderful inside, and I look forward to candlelit dinners in there in the summer.

My studio is starting to feel like a studio, and is getting a lot more light! A cork floor and some white walls and I am good to go. While I think I am doing ok without painting, I am really not. I wander into the solvents aisle at the art store and think about stocking up, and Im hoarding jars at home. I think I will be moving in as soon as is possible.

Oh my goodness

So this tree had two hollow stumps. This one has a crack about 12 feet long from the base here up the trunk. The tree guys are amazed it was actually still standing up. I am so glad this did come out. Now I am eying our other cottonwood...what's going on inside that one?

Rain

Every time it rains I cringe. The roof leaks in so many places, right down into the rooms. All the architects drawings and papers are still in the house. Today's project: contact the archives to try to get someone to take them out of this damp studio. I will also be packing up books to donate to the library from the bookshelves. Preliminary budget meeting on Friday with architect and contractor. Reed and I are both holding our breath til we get real numbers.

Tree Removal from the Inside

from the master bedroom to the living room. Yep, it opens right onto it.

going up to the roof garden to check out the tree removal.

The living room with so much more light!

Tree Removal

There is a really old cottonwood in our backyard. Cottonwoods have short lives, I guess, for a tree: about 70 years. The garden hasn't been touched in a long time. The cottonwood dominated the yard. An arborist came and strongly recommended removal. He said it would 'crush' the neighbor's house.

The split trunk is hollow on the right.
So one trunk came down today. Here are the guys pulling a big section of the tree, the part at the top of this right hand trunk. There is so much more light coming into the house already.

The front was overgrown too. We took out a big topped spruce, some arborvitae, and a bunch of overgrown juniper. I love seeing the columns and the long horizontal expanse of the house become more visible. When the trees are pruned in winter we should see the form of the house even better.

Welcome to our world

Ive been posting on Facebook for awhile about our home remodel project: it is time to get serious and move it onto a longer forum where I can explain my cryptic posts.

I'll tell the story throughout the blog, but here are the basics: In April 2009, we decided to move to Illinois for jobs at Northwestern University from beautiful Seattle WA. We had completed a remodel in 2007 that we loved. After our wonderful friends and neighbors, it was the hardest thing to leave in Seattle. As Reed noted, we get to keep the friends--the house we never get to have again. So we knew we wanted to find a special place to live in Illinois: near NU, good schools, near good natural areas and near the train for those schoolday trips to the Art Institute.
We looked and looked and in June 2009, with our move date of August 1 looming, we still had not found a house. July rolled around, and still no dice. We decided that Reed should go back and look, one last time, for rentals and potential purchases.

At some point in June our agent told us about this house she had heard about that was in an estate that we might be interested in. Reed saw it in July, and went back three times that week to mull it over. It was the family home of an architect named J. Marion Gutnayer, who passed away at 95 in 2005. His wife Alice, a high school French teacher, passed in 2007, and the house had been sitting empty, unheated and full of most of their possessions, for the past few years.

Reed made an offer and we purchased the house from the estate while we were moving: I don't remember clearly, but I do remember reviewing terms at Gordon Ranch in Montana, so it must have been in early August 2009. I did not see the house in person before we bought it. Having completed our remodel in Seattle together, I trusted him.