renovating the gutnayer house

penny cloud finished

2011-08-18T05:24:00.000-07:00

A reader came across my post on the penny clouds and asked for finished pictures. Here they are! I love the penny clouds, particularly the one on the floor in the shower. I wish I had a chance to design another one of these: once you start, the possibilities are endless.


Master Bath with penny cloud at upper right and on floor at left

We used the basic penny tile family from a Chicago tile showroom. We had to use colors from one tile family because different pennies are different dimensions and heights. Penny tile is an inexpensive way to get a tile with some color variation in the glaze. Color variation can be an expensive feature as you get into larger tile because it is usually glazed by hand. We used blue, white, and bronze tiles to achieve this penny cloud.

the wall cloud

the floor cloud

The tub is a basic 5 foot jacuzzi tub with a custom Caesarstone surround. This is a tiny master bath--but it feels spacious and peaceful inside the wet room. One of the things I love about the way the Caesarstone is finished is the tiny lip at the edges of the counters which keep water from dripping off the edge. This quartz material has a matte finish which is easy to maintain and very lovely.

family house

2011-07-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

orange makes a great ground

So we moved in in October 2010. As you can see from the nine month gap in postings, the house became a home and getting it liveable became the priority. We also ran into some serious problems with our builder which made the whole process of getting into the house strained and difficult. The joy and excitement of the blog was overshadowed by long complicated emails to the builder, the subs and finally to lawyers. However, we love the house and are settling in well to it. It is, as hoped, a wonderful family house.

ikea doors as white board

I have been taking process shots all along the way and will add them as chronologically as I can. We are about to embark on the landscaping (!) so I will also post some discussion of my inspirations and how that design process is going.


deep window frames make great dollhouses

The pictures in this post all show the ways that the kids have modified the house to make it theirs.


The big fireplace makes an excellent backboard for wall ball


kid art makes art clock look less lonely

we finished the penthouse: and the kids moved in!

the midcentury muse

2010-10-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

There are so many satisfying things happening at the house! I am gloating about our re-use of the original light fixtures. Here is the post about all the things we harvested from the house to use again.

We could have replaced our original fixtures with something like this, at $225 a pop.

aloha, from rejuvenation

But we kept the old ones, and they are happily re-installed this week. With 19 fixtures in the ceiling, that means we saved roughly $4000. just re-using the perfectly good fixtures we have.

You'll see them throughout, and a few others that we re-used.

Here are the orange doors. You get a teaser of the cork floor, which is being installed. It does not have finish on it, so imagine it a few shades darker. It will feel, I think, like a lawn indoors.

The architects added a cove light above the fireplace, which ties the FP to walls and ceiling beautifully. You can see the flooring extending onto the benches. I have been looking at Knoll wool remnants on ebay to buy for making cushions.


old meets new

Here are the old lights meeting the new kitchen, where the wood ceiling folds over the beam above. While our architects (hi guys!) have suffered multiple design phases on some elements in the house, this was one of many immediate YES, we love it elements.


the before view, with mahogany paneling removed.

reinstalling bedside lamps

Here we are deciding where to hang the old bedside lamps. We are also re-installing three alien lamps on the north wall. My friend Mark Butler took an Ikea version of one of these and played crazy man alien with it and ever since I cannot look at one without thinking of him. I toyed with going all Martha Stewart on these and getting them painted an autobody shop. I decided in the end that the brass on the bedside lamps would be lonely without them, and if we weren't changing the others, these would stay the same too.

alien lamps in the bedroom

Alien as they are, the are the perfect length in relation to the beam and the open space above it. You can see our Tom Dixon mirror ball kissing the ceiling in the dining room beyond. Once it gets hung above a table, I think it will feel right at home.

That's it for now! Move in is now scheduled just before Halloween.

closing in

2010-09-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

It has been a month again between blog posts, and I cannot believe it. Time is flying, school is in session, work has begun again for me, and I have a few shows I have been busy with. The house is rolling along and we will be moving in at the end of October. Cabinets, finishes and all are underway. Flooring comes soon.


fireplace wall, Sept. 24, 2010

This is the fireplace, with the new ceiling color (elmira white, benjamin moore) and the wall color (white dove, benjamin moore). The fireplace has new benches running along each side, which cover up some unsightly plumbing and give us some wonderful seating. The floor has a new layer of subfloor on it, getting ready for the cork floor, which goes on soon.

sunroom, Sept 24

This image shows the beginning of the mahogany wall. This wall reuses wood paneling from the original construction. This hardwood material surrounded the kitchen. Our carpenters took it down many months ago and stored it for reuse. The wall runs the length of the house:

master bath sink along corridor, Sept 24

past three bedrooms (which will have orange doors: next post!), past the bathrooms and the new master bath, which is built right into the wall.


master sink area storage drawers, faced with reclaimed paneling

master bedroom, south wall

master bedroom, shelf detail, south wall

and then it continues right on into the bedroom. There was just enough to do this wall where the bed goes. We have two other woods we salvaged that we may hold off on using. This was by far the best material of the bunch.

kitchen Sept 24, looking east

This is our ikea kitchen, complete with brilliant ikea hack. The paneling on the ceiling is large panels that normally front a cabinet or are the side on an exterior face. The kitchen has a lower ceiling than the rest of the house as described in an earlier post. Strecket handles, brown cabinet faces. We are splurging on some caesarstone countertops. We were going to go budget with laminate but just couldn't find a surface pattern we liked. The stone will be the same in the kitchen and bath.

built in refrigerator installation

Anton is the ikea mastermind in the group. So many tiny details, all worked out beautifully.

kitchen, west side, old maid's room

These cabinets are maybe the only Ikea giveaway in this kitchen. We were going to do dark grey cabinet faces here, but Ikea has changed their smoky grey to an almost black foil. So we went with translucent glass, which I think is going to look great when it is packed full of colors and boxes. We'll see!


dining room, Sept 24

Dig that natural light, in all its violet-y wonder. The skylights have been shedding their yellowing ancient skins and getting new interior cladding, and light is just pouring in in buckets. This room is fairly dark, but that art wall will get a lot of help from the skylight.

And now for the outside...

european hornbeam going in: new back hedge

our landscape architect drawing the lawn

We decided to go deeper into debt and do the planning and a chunk of the landscaping on the site. The Gutnayers mowed the lawn and kept the weeds at bay, but otherwise there wasn't much landscaping done on the site. With a lot of mature trees, there has been a ton of pruning, removal and cleanup to do this year. See an early post about the hollow cottonwood!

We hired Mariani Landscape to do the design and installation of the garden front and back, and love what they have come up with. I hope, ahem, to be able to maintain it, but it is a lot more yard than I have ever tackled before, and this is without my neighbor taking care of me and mowing our grass when it got too tall.

First chunk of work: new hedge at the back edge of the property, replacing some invasive species that were planted right underneath the powerlines, so they were regularly pruned by ComEd to about 10 feet. We planted European Hornbeams just in front of the powerlines so they can grow as tall as they can, which will be, well, tall. The soil is pretty remarkable on this part of the Lake, so we don't have to do much amending. The hornbeams pretty much blew our phase 1 budget. We are putting down sod for the rear lawn and then mulching the whole site. No plants this fall. It will all be covered in snow soon anyway!

More soon: paint colors, original lighting re-install, and other crazy progress.

drywall

2010-08-30T05:26:00.000-07:00

August disappeared in a flurry of moving and vacation. After a couple weeks of packing, sorting, and tossing, we moved most of our stuff from our rental into storage and some of our stuff into new rental house for the final portion of construction. On our moving day, we did this in the morning:

and then our block party in the afternoon:

and then flew the next day to Seattle to give our architect a break:

and finally spent a week at the magical ranch in MT.

Before we left, the drywallers were busy getting all the walls in. The light and shapes are all pretty glorious, don't you think?

The bedroom and the exposed beam

the kitchen

We took the mini-clients through before we left to get their reaction. Here they are standing in the kitchen with the island cabinets in place. They love it! The kitchen ceiling is lower than the rest of the main room, which created a design opportunity when we integrated the kitchen into the main space. The architects designed a system using Ikea kitchen cabinetry panels to clad the ceiling. A great Ikea hack: it delineates the kitchen and makes what felt odd before feel intentional.

from the kitchen in to the living and dining area

A coat of primer and paint has gone on the walls now. The rooms are glowing.

penny tile cloud

2010-08-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

We did a lot of thinking about what kind of tile to use in the bathrooms. We had a tiny budget for tile and I wanted something that felt handmade. Glass tile was going to be too contemporary for our house. Our master bathroom is small, only 6' across, so we wanted something that would make it feel spacious and modern. Penny tile comes with a dark clay base, which adds a nice depth to the tile. It also allows a variation in the tone of the glaze that you only get with more expensive hand glazed tile (think Heath, which we did, for a long time). I knew I wanted to do some kind of modern patterning with the pennies. After looking at some preliminary sketches mostly involving different colored lines of tile, our architect suggested we do a cloud of pennies. The cloud ended up being most elegant idea. Using Illustrator and Photoshop I did a whole bunch of studies:

And then we worked out a process with Paul, the tile artist on the WB dream team. He set the field tile, I marked the tiles with stickers for each accent color and he would remove and replace with the accents. The color in the photos is pretty terrible: this work was done and photographed with one bright incandescent shop light. The color palette in the rendering above is closer to the actual tile color: sky blue field tile, light blue/white and bronze accents.

Doing the first half of the cloud, with dot stickers from the drug store.

the final wall cloud. It is about five feet across.


the floor cloud phase one


the floor cloud, halfway done.

The grout should be going in pretty soon. I had to buy three bags of grout and test the colors (just rub a bit of dry grout powder over the tiles and see what you think). It had to be just right! We ended up with pewter, a medium dark grey that will make all the tile pop but/and feel unified.

I can't wait to see the clouds with all the final finishes in the bathroom in place.

insulation

2010-08-02T21:29:00.000-07:00

I have been pretty remiss in my posting! I have been busy buying things like this:


from tomdixon.net

and this:


from ikea.com

and appliances and the sink. Money has been flying out the into the ether and big heavy boxes arrive at our house and get in the carpenters' way. In the meantime the house is getting all buttoned up and ready for finishes: last week was insulation.

We used foam insulation, which has a certain finality to it!

It is sprayed in to the walls and then carved away to produce the flat surface ready for drywall application. I am liking the way the window openings change as the walls get more solid. They make beautiful glowing green frames on the walls.

art institute

2010-06-18T16:58:00.000-07:00

The Art Institute finished sorting through all the material that we donated to them a few months ago. Here it is in its new home in their temporary storage in South Chicago:

It will eventually make its way into flat files and more long term homes. The bulk of his archive is here and I was am pleased so much of it found a home together. I was surprised to see they kept a number of his art catalogs and publications. It turns out artists that he gathered catalogs from on his European trips were not represented in their collection.

I did need to sort through what was left and decide what to bring home.

In the center of this photo is what is coming home with us. I sorted the work in this warehouse space with the empty cases. The Lincolnwood houses (covered in an earlier post) are coming home with us, as well as a number of unbuilt designs for apartment buildings on trace, a couple renderings I did not see on my first run through, and some other houses I am not sure I caught in the inventory. Now I have two fat portfolios under our bed and a couple tubs of drawings...not bad. I definitely have some room for the Gute in my studio.

I had an epic drive home because of terrible traffic, so I took Chicago's westernmost Boulevards north through six glorious parks. I am in love with this city. So much so that I persist in driving down there. Once I get my new bike, watch out: I'll be gone all day.

tomato farm next summer

2010-06-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

Here is our new white roof. Yup, we'll need sunglasses up there! But I think things that like heat will grow like gangbusters. We'll have to see what the roof can handle. After nine months with a leaky roof, it is such a good feeling to see this new one go on.

the roof

2010-06-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

One of the many reasons that we hired Wilkinson Blender Architects is their inclination to do roof gardens wherever possible. Our house had a pull down stair that accessed the roof, but not much going on up there. There was once an outdoor shower, and the architect envisioned much more. In this drawing from 1957 you can see the angled 'dog house' as a triangular wedge. It held the ceiling height for the stair going up, and then there was some kind shelter when the house was complete (you can see that in the image in the banner on this blog).

We are making the stair a permanent stair and adding a little bit of a room and deck up there. The intention stated for permit is access and storage for roof maintenance (our air conditioners will be up there) but we are squeezing in a little more function: a small place to work for Reed and a small deck to sit on. Over the course of a couple very rainy weeks, the carpenters have created the opening and built the shelter. From the inside, I had not anticipated that it would act like a new skylight.

This wall will be all bookshelves, as high and as wide as we can reach. The stair will be a 'secret' stair. You won't see when you look at it from a right angle but it will appear when you turn to head upwards. I can't find any of the renderings the architects sent, but here is the inspiration image that they passed on.

Here's a shot of the interior of the penthouse, with Greg, our architect/GC checking out the view from Reed's desk.

And here is a view from the across the street. Here is the old doghouse for comparison:

The new roof is going on this week. It will be white material, as opposed to the black composition material that is on there now. It did occur to us that we will need sunglasses on a bright day up there. Maybe we will eventually cover it up with photovoltaic panels! or sedum trays! we'll see what the roof can hold and what the budget and climate will allow once we are all moved in.

a new archive

2010-06-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

I thought I would write a bit about my new archive, the Chicago Artists Archive. I have a show in September and October of 2010 at the Harold Washington Center of the Chicago Public Library. Artists who show at the library are included in an archive of over 9000 Chicagoland artists that is held and maintained in the Visual and Performing Arts Library.

October is Chicago Artists Month, and the theme is the City as Studio. Chicago has been having a year long dialog about the artist studio in all its forms. Since I have been studio-less and have been working with archives all year, I thought I should treat the library as my studio and use it as a place to make my work. I am reviewing the entire artist archive while I make work for the show. So far I have reviewed A-C and gotten through 2 of the twelve file drawers of archival material.

Part of me wonders at myself, driving into the city to sit in the library, alone, looking through drawers and drawers of artist materials mostly from 1940-2000. I mean really: I spent my fall, alone, in a cold studio going through each page of one architect's projects and papers from 1950-1990. Why not go out and meet real live artists? I am much more inclined to the former, and I have always struggled with that. I love that I can sit and look through materials during the day while my kids are at school. I get to mull over the rich lives of hundreds of local people. I am getting an education in Chicago art history. And if I don't do it now, I will never take the time to do it. Hooray for sabbaticals!

The archive covers artists well known and not so. Faculty from all the local universities and art schools are represented, as well as every variety of sculptor, painter, printmaker, community activist, artist-run gallery, and artist working out in the suburbs. I am, of course, particularly drawn to the latter. Artists who grew up in Chicago and worked elsewhere are included (like Judy Chicago) and artists who moved to Chicago and work here now are included as well. Some artists built themselves into the archive with exhaustive letters and documentation they sent to the librarian/curators. Other artists are included unbeknownst to them, via all kinds of coverage in the local press, from reviews to obituaries.

Am I looking for anything in particular? Yes and no. I am looking at the whole archive because I don't want to miss anyone. Ideas and history are everywhere. I am writing down fragments of artist statements and the names of artists whose work touches me. I am writing down recurring galleries and art critics who I want to trace through the archive and through time. And I am writing down adjacencies: when the juxtaposition of two artists is poignant and the only reason for their relationship is that their last names are similar or the same.

I grapple with a fear of failing at my own artistic endeavor: not working hard enough, or publicly enough, or honestly enough. When I sit down at the archive, at first I feel heavy with the burden of so many artists represented by a single piece of writing or photograph of their work. But then I keep reading and see signs of each artist working with clear intention and purpose. Why do we do it? Because we can, and we are driven to, and it helps keep us fulfilled. And why do librarians, archivists, and art lovers adopt our things and our narrative and attend to them? That is one question guiding the drawings I am making.

Are there lessons in the archive? One for sure: keep making beautiful printed ephemera and send it to people who are thoughtful savers. Otherwise archivists print out ugly website versions of your show announcements on archival paper and THAT is your legacy. Shiver.

Treehouse

2010-05-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

Our house is a treehouse, and it especially feels like one now with all the windows removed.

On nice days the carpenters pull down all the masonite and it is open all the way through. It is quite a feeling!

We got our letter today about our bid for the state tax freeze application. At this stage, they do not feel our house qualifies because of the changes we made to the front windows (see this post on structure) and the amount of removal we have done on the interior. We anticipated this, but I am still a little disappointed, mostly from a preservation perspective.

After going through this process, I wish there was a middle ground, where a more moderate tax incentive is offered to homeowners who preserve a period structure on the exterior. The interior preservation is so worthwhile for posterity, but is not always in the homeowner's best interest. For contemporary use, resale value, and to carefully update our home to current code, we elected to make some changes that are significant on the inside. But on the outside, the house is virtually unchanged and will be the same as it has been for fifty years from the perspective of the Village or the neighbors. And I think it is worth providing an incentive to keep the variety of styles, ages, and housing types in our Village and the neighboring cities and communities. Without any incentive to preserve the building, it makes financial sense to raze homes and build anew, so that the structure, insulation, wiring, ducting can be brand new and up to current standards.

Once the project is complete, we may go back to them and show what we have done and ask them to consider our application again. And at the very least I'll write a letter, and renew my membership in the local preservation organizations that are fighting this fight every day.

Gutnayer and FLW, continued.

2010-05-12T20:47:00.000-07:00

You'll see in an earlier post that within a year of Gutnayer's arrival in the US he made a pilgrimage to meet Frank Lloyd Wright. I am slowly getting to know FLW's work, and am seeing more and more connections between what the Gute began doing in his residential practice in the 50s and what FLW had established in his practice in the 40s. As is pointed out on Wikipedia about FLW, a lot of the innovations laid out in the Usonian houses and Wright's ideas about suburban homes were picked up by developers and architects in the 1950s. PrairieMod posted a link to this Illinois farmhouse by FLW, and I was struck by the eave:

from prairiemod via dailyherald.com

because of the similarity of the later eave design by the Gute:

on this house in Lincolnwood ( JMG drawing above and my photograph below)

or this house in Highland Park

I had not really realized how much Gutnayer might have been influenced by the Usonian houses. Many of the Usonian houses were laid out on a regular module. Gutnayer has one built project here in Chicago that is designed on a strict grid and built: I am going to go down and take a look and actually knock on the door, which I have not really done yet with his residences.

Interestingly, there is one site plan (in the materials that went to the Art Institute) for a development in Westchester County by Gutnayer and his brother in the early 50s. Gutnayer's brother was also an architect and practiced in New York City. I am interested in researching this a bit because of the proximity to Pleasantville, NY location of the Usonia homes. Not to mention all the significant modern architecture in Westchester County. Oh, if I only knew or cared about any of this while my grandparents were alive and we were in Westchester on a regular basis!

skylights

2010-04-28T18:39:00.000-07:00

The house is being tuckpointed and getting new mortar right now. It looks great: like it got a shower and a haircut. The front window got its new sill. You can see the new columns lining up with the concrete supports below. Windows just got ordered, so it will be a few weeks before these openings are filled with new glass.

Inside all the window openings are covered with masonite, so the house is only lit by the skylights. These photos were all taken without a flash.

I remember Reed telling me when he looked at the house there were very few functioning lightbulbs and that it took him awhile to realize that the spaces were all lit naturally from above. The house was designed with seven skylights.

Our kids standing under the skylight in the kitchen. Poor Will is being required to stand for a photo when all he wants to do is get to the porta potty outside. Ella is plugging her nose: with the masons and the carpenters working it is pretty dusty.

There are skylights in the two adjacent bathrooms. We thought we were losing them but re-design recently salvaged them. And now that I see this, I am really, really glad.

Here is the master bathroom with its skylight.

and the master closet with its skylight.

All these photos were taken without a flash, so the only light source is the not-so-big skylights. It was quite beautiful to see how much natural light comes in from just those seven openings in the roof.

now you see it now you don't

2010-04-19T16:06:00.000-07:00

We were up in Deerfield, IL (west of Highland Park) for a birthday party dropoff yesterday and so I grabbed my list and camera before we left the house. Sad results mostly: the streets we visited had many new houses intermingled with 50s ranch houses, which is the sign of teardowns. Since Gutnayer only listed the street and not the address in most cases, we can only guess where the houses might have been.
We did find one though, and as usual its a thrill to come around a corner and see one of his signature eaves.

That's Reed on the right, on his first house scouting mission.

This house is currently a rental and had a for sale sign on it. When I jumped out of the car and started taking pictures, a guy walked out of the neighboring house and said he owned it, but it isn't for sale: the sign is for the new construction that will go up in its place.

You can see the redwood pattern on the eave that has been painted over.

This house was on a nice big lot and had big windows on both sides of a sunken living room. I wanted to go in but babies were sleeping so we couldn't see the inside. I am going to contact the developer and see if I can get inside before it gets torn down to take some pictures and hopefully salvage some Gutnayer details.

finishes!

2010-04-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

There are a few big drivers in figuring out finishes on our project. One is the fireplace, which is pink, white and grey stone. The second is all the natural light coming in from all directions. A third is the ceiling, which is currently stained off white and will be either given another layer of lighter, brighter white stain or painted, probably not hard core white, but a warm off white or off grey, something light but peaceful. Here's our current flooring material, which is kind of a light jade green:

It is a 12x12 cork tile with a vertical grain to it and a green wash. We were unanimous in our last site meeting that this is THE ONE. We can afford it, it is sustainable, and we can put it everywhere. The brown wood stain swatch is the IKEA cabinets fronts that we are using in the kitchen. And on the ceiling. More on that later!

new structural connections

2010-04-18T20:11:00.000-07:00

Our house is a frame box sitting on top of steel beams that land on concrete columns. The architects are reinforcing and strengthening some of those connections with new steel posts in a range of places in the house, but particularly on the wall with the ribbon window.

The pink spray paint squares on the floor show where the new steel is. You can see the new beams being added as structural support where there were once walls running across. You can also see the new header on the ribbon window and the new columns running down through the floor.

Here you can see the new columns coming down through the floor and landing on the concrete columns just adjacent to the steel beam. These new columns change the rhythm of the window pattern in the front, which is fine with us but probably does in our potential for historic rehabilitation. We're good with it. Making the house structurally sound for the next phase of its life is our goal. As we get further into the process, it is easier to let go of some of the issues of original intent. To say that raises lots of interesting thoughts. It is true, however and the house is really starting to feel like ours, and I can feel our architect's design intentions coming alive. As we keep saying, we think the Gute would approve.

new steel in the kitchen going right down through the subfloor to the steel beam underneath.

Here the structural engineers are reinforcing beams that span a long distance
(our two car garage entrance under the kitchen) by adding layers of steel.

under construction

2010-04-08T20:44:00.000-07:00

This looks so tiny: blogs are so vertical!
ctrl-click on it to see it better in a new window.

We (the architects, the carpenters, the clients) love the house wide open like this while everything is still studs. Here I am standing in the kitchen, looking south. From left to right the spaces are: dining room with screen porch beyond, master bedroom, hearth, family room, second dining area. The dark posts are new steel and are permanent. Some of the light posts are temporary support and will be removed. That beautiful minimal box houses the piano. I like how it ended up partnered with the void of the circular stair to the right of the fireplace.

Certificate of Rehabilitation

2010-04-07T21:25:00.000-07:00

So we are going ahead with an application for a certificate of rehabilitation from the state. Property taxes are pretty steep here, and once the valuation on the house goes up we could be looking at significant savings over the next ten years if we freeze at the lowest valuation (next year). Also, I am interested and curious to have a conversation with the state architects about our project, and to determine how the changes we are making to the house do or do not fall in line with expectations for historical preservation. Our house is just a baby in historical preservation terms and modern and traditional architecture diverge in many ways. Here are the guidelines:

Illinois Standards for Rehabilitation
1. A property shall be used for its historic purpose or be placed in a new use that requires minimal change to the defining characteristics of the building and its site and environment.

Good on this one. It's a house, we are using it as a house.

2. The historic character of a property shall be retained and preserved. The removal of historic materials or alteration of features and spaces that characterize a property shall be avoided.

We are removing elements and altering spaces, and this gave me pause. So far, however, conversations about this with the state are relatively positive. It seems preserving a certain proportion of critical elements in public spaces and the house overall is key.

3. Each property shall be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use. Changes that create a false sense of historical development, such as adding conjectural features or architectural elements from other buildings, shall not be undertaken.

I love the purity of this one. Absolutely.

4. Most properties change over time; those changes that have acquired historic significance in their own right shall be retained and preserved.

This is the one I have been thinking about the most. We are the first ones to alter this house after the original owner and builder. If we think 200 years down the line, our architects are the ones who are making changes that will acquire that layer of historical significance. How many Villa Savoye-inspired rocket ranches on pilotis are there in Illinois, anyway? The changes they are making, particularly lining up the structural grid (more on this in the next post) are important. I feel we are making the house more true to its bones.

5. Distinctive features, finishes, and construction techniques or examples of craftsmanship that characterize a property shall be preserved.

Note that it does not state explicitly that they need to remain in place. We have removed the paneling and light fixtures to re-wire and re-insulate. Virtually all the material in good condition will be re-used and much will go back in the same place it came from: sustainability, design and budget practicality all align here. However, some materials have been removed, and some material will be installed in new locations.

6. Deteriorated historic features shall be repaired rather than replaced. Where the severity of deterioration requires replacement of a distinctive feature, the new feature shall match the old in design, color, texture, and other visual qualities and, where possible, materials. Replacement of missing features shall be substantiated by documentary, physical, or pictorial evidence.

Luckily we do have pictorial and drawing evidence for the few removed elements (from our time and the Gutnayer's time), so one could return the house to an earlier state if desired.

7. Chemical or physical treatments, such as sandblasting, that cause damage to historic materials shall not be used. The surface cleaning of structures, if appropriate, shall be undertaken using the gentlest means possible.

Yup.

8. Significant archaeological resources affected by a project shall be protected and preserved. If such resources must be disturbed, mitigation measures shall be undertaken.

I wonder if the vintage Sunfish that is still on the side of the house qualifies as an archeological resource.

Sunfish, anyone?

9. New additions, exterior alterations, or related new construction shall not destroy historic materials that characterize the property. The new work shall be differentiated from the old and shall be compatible with the massing, size, scale, and architectural features to protect the historic integrity of the property and its environment.

I appreciate this idea. So architectural and modern in its essence—what is new should be new—related, compatible, but having its own distinct design.

10.New additions and adjacent or related new construction shall be undertaken in such a manner that if removed in the future, the essential form and integrity of the historic property and its environment would be unimpaired.

Nice and logical. Touch lightly and make future restoration easier to do. Our additions touch lightly in this way.

We still aren't sure if we will get it: we won't know for a few months and the state has asked for more drawings. At this point it is difficult to predict what will happen with taxation rates and property values, so figuring out cost/benefit is a bit...speculative. We maintain the attitude that we will continue to do what is best for the house, preserving as much of its character and material as we can while shoring it up and making it ours.

the archive moves to new homes

2010-04-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

I've been on a bit of a hiatus with a spring break trip to Berkeley and tax time duties taking away from blog time. Two weeks ago, the papers finally left. As the date drew closer we scanned some pieces, some wonderful curators came to the house to collect materials, and some I delivered out to the local historical societies on a blustery winter day.

The bulk of the collection is going to the Chicago Art Institute Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Drawings are also now housed at the Evanston History Center, The Highland Park Historical Society, the Wilmette Historical Museum, the Glenview History Center and the Glencoe Historical Society. A truck came from the Art Institute and two guys loaded up the collection to take to their storage facility south of downtown. Can you imagine having that job, gathering the things that eventually make their way into the Art Institute's collection in any area? When I asked if I could take pictures, Billy said most people do and that he was used to it. He also said he was pretty photogenic.

I'm going to indulge in a little before and after:

the store room, before (with architect's drawings in tubes above the cubbies)
and after (studio, here I come!)

the architect's studio before and after.
We will be using this as a 'multipurpose room'
which means we really don't want to put any furniture in it.

Here's the big truck.

The drawings looked awfully fragile strapped into the back of that bad boy. All I could think about was driving one of those trucks in college when I worked catering and how it bobbed and weaved as I drove around the Santa Cruz campus. But it sounds like they got there safe and sound!

edgewater motel

2010-03-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

I never leave the house without the camera now, because there is always the chance of zooming right by a Gutnayer project. Sure enough today, we drove right by one of the motels that is in his drawings.

Now there are many of these little motels all over Chicagoland, but how many are in beautiful shape and are right down the street from the leaning tower of Pisa?

Edgewater Motel, Touhy & Nagle, Niles, IL

We were on our way to Elk Grove Village, where we ate lunch in a Japanese restaurant in an industrial park. It was the first time I ate in a Japanese restaurant where most of the patrons were speaking Japanese. On our way back, we stopped briefly to photograph the hotel.

The restrained Gutnayer eave in action.

structural corrections

2010-03-21T05:53:00.000-07:00

temporary posts in the area where rot was found

you can see the two new columns inside the windows directly above the concrete columns

and the busted up sill

The sill of the front window was broken and sagging inward when we bought the house, which was attributed possibly to freeze and thaw cycles over time or poor load distribution around the window. When the carpenters got into the wall around the window, there were some odd choices made about how to carry the loads downward, but the real problem were some rotted members below the window on the underside of the second floor. The window had very little holding it up and a lot pressing down on it. The carpenters are now shoring things up inside. The steel header over the window is now being supported by (among other things) two temporary steel posts that run down to the concrete columns on the first floor. The original solution was aluminum columns under the steel header that ran down to wood, which then rotted out.

original aluminum column on right going down to wood
new temp steel going down to concrete column on left.

The architects asked the carpenters to try to use the temporary columns to lift the weight off the window and sure enough, they got an inch of vertical space back for the facade. They said that the first 3/4 inch was actually pretty easy, and you could hear the house sighing with relief when the weight was lifted off the window and the wall.

peeling away

2010-03-10T20:55:00.000-08:00

The carpet has come off the circular stair to reveal these worn treads on the original wood.

The circular stair with its plywood veneer siding removed.

In the rear you can see the space where the bookshelf was removed and a temporary column to take weight off the window wall, which had an 'experimental' construction method that needs shoring up and re-thinking before the new windows can go in.

The Master Bedroom with the funky stair in front removed.

The current plan is for this room to have translucent sliding doors along the whole opening.to allow light to enter the living room and to keep some of this openness while giving the bedroom some privacy.

glencoe

2010-03-05T10:21:00.000-08:00

So, yesterday I was up in Highland Park, not Glencoe. I have a couple more to visit up there, but the more high rent the neighborhood, the less likely the Gutnayer houses are to have survived. In Glencoe I found two of six today, which is not so great. The two I found today are just a few blocks apart from each other.

Funny how that evergreen is pruned right to the edge of the eave.

This house is built with the same brick as our house. All perhaps from one lot?

highland park

2010-03-04T20:01:00.000-08:00

There has been beautiful sun the last couple days, so with a half hour to spare today I sped up to Highland Park to try to track down some of Gutnayer's built projects. Most of his projects in the suburbs are labeled with the client and street name only, so I have to go out and drive around to find them. One address was a maybe: it looked like a well designed ranch house with one pronounced eave, but it was hard to call. One was probably lost (replaced with a new/old french country house) and the other was, well, this.

This eave is redwood. It looks to be in pretty remarkable shape. This house is on a corner site, as are most of his houses. I really appreciate the way the house looks so different from each angle. Also—and I don't know whether this is brilliant or strange—the balance of the house from the outside appears to be a fairly standard ranch.

I have not seen one of these strong patterned eaves in person until today. They appear in a number of his projects, including the original drawings for our house.

In the design for our house, the redwood eave was to hold a clerestory window that would let light into the main floor. There were to be two of them, one facing south, the other north (you can see it in this elevation peeking out behind the front clerestory). He instead used seven skylights to light the main floor (or 'sky domes' as he called them out in the drawings: perhaps that was the term at the time). While I have been doubtful that these would look good on our house, I love it on the house above. And think it is well paired with the unique brick pattern. Gutnayer was not shy about detail. I really, really would like to get inside some of these and see how they feel from within.

Plans

2010-03-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

So for those of you for whom plans are hard to read, I apologize in advance. These are really hard to read, being photocopies of original plans that are now tiny and pixelated. But, in the interest of explaining my demolition photographs, I think I better give a brief sense of the layout of the house. Since we are fortunate to have both Gutnayer's original design drawings and a quick set of as built drawings, I will show both.

original design, main floor J. M. Gutnayer, 1957

To orient you briefly: the bottom of the drawing is the front of the house: the little dots and dashes along the horizontal line represent the window mullions of the ribbon window. The circular stair is how you enter the house from the ground floor. The beds and baths are on the right side of the drawing, with the kitchen/living and dining on the left side. The elements highlighted in blue are the things that changed when the house was built. The only major change was the orientation and scale of the fireplace. His design oriented the fireplace towards the dining room and had a smaller footprint than what was built. Also, he designed a 'skydome' over the circular stair that was not installed.

as built plan, main floor, J.M. Gutnayer, 1958

Here you can see the different shape of the fireplace, and also the different orientation of the exterior stair. It was originally drawn to head back to the rear of the house, but was built to move to the front by the garage. The elements in red are the elements we are removing from the house, the elements in blue are being added. We are removing the stair on the north side of the house (the left side of this drawing) and replacing it with a stair down to the backyard from the lanai. The bookshelf and maid's room walls that interrupted the continuous ribbon window from the inside are being removed to create a very open main room.

from inside maid's room.

from the family room, seeing the continuous window.

What will go in the space in front the window? We expect it will be very sparsely furnished, if at all. This floor area is designated un-programmed, lying in the sun, reading the paper, doing a project space.

it begins!

2010-03-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

here we go!

The dumpster and portapotty are in place, the fence is up, the demo guys are working on the interior today. Design meeting tomorrow, design drawings shortly thereafter.

What about our house?

2010-02-21T10:53:00.000-08:00

We are awaiting approval of our permit, probably this week. We have been working on design with our architects and are hammering out a few details. I will post design sketches once I get their approval. We are really, really excited. I have two searches going on on Ebay: one for kinetic sculpture, which our house will really need, and one for a mid-century chandelier, to replace the crazy one that Gutnayer placed in the dining room. We are thinking about giving some of the furniture that we purchased with the house re-upholstering and cleaning. We discovered that the triangle table, at work in this post, is a Widdicomb (a well known midwestern furniture company) table designed by George Nakashima, who is a University of Washington Architecture graduate. It's not really a small world, it just feels like one.

Keck & Keck

2010-02-21T10:42:00.000-08:00

Here in Wilmette there are many traditional houses, many builder ranch houses, and the occasional modern or contemporary house. There are a number of modern houses that is so consistent I started wondering if they were designed by the same firm. While flipping through the local paper, I saw a real estate listing for a Keck house listed essentially as a teardown. A quick googling of Keck and there is so much interesting history to read about and houses to see. Keck & Keck was a father and son firm. Keck Sr. designed two houses at the Chicago World's Fair. The Crystal House (1934) is considered by some to be a precedent to Mies' famous building systems. The story of the houses built for the Fair ending up in sand dunes in Indiana is quite remarkable. Field trip, anyone?

I have been trying to wait to post about this until I had received Keck & Keck from the library, but I just couldn't. Yesterday we took a trip down to the snowy beach and while the kids were playing on the playground, I noticed this house across the street.

I say notice, but really, I had seen this house many times. I had admired its form and wondered about its colors. Now, having read up a bit on these architects, I am pretty sure this is a Keck house because of the louvers that flank the windows. Keck & Keck were early, perhaps the earliest, designers who used passive solar systems to cool homes. Keck pere designed a famous modernist building just two blocks north of our house, called the Miralago, which burned down. These stories about the Miralago are wonderful.

I believe that two of Gutnayer's houses are built across the street from Keck houses, one in Wilmette and one up in Winnetka. I will post the houses and their relationships if I can confirm this.

Why I care

2010-02-19T16:28:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about why, with this move and this legacy, I am now so interested in the architecture around me. Getting pulled in by one architect's projects has gotten me in much more deeply than anywhere else I have ever lived. Seattle and Berkeley, my two former homes, had lots of interesting houses and architects to see, but I never really connected deeply to the architectural traditions of the two places. I knew about Maybeck, Morgan, Ratcliff and Greene & Greene (in Berkeley) because of houses we drove by every day, but I knew little about the modern architects of the 50s. There are some great brutalist concrete buildings in Berkeley, including the University Art Museum, which is seismically unsound now and may not be with us forever. I love that building as a work of art itself. I never sought out the architect's name until recently.

The Puget Sound has a rich tradition of modernism, and a friend of mine is making a film about a number of the significant modernists. I never drove around looking for their houses, or sought out names of architects and landscape designers, or looked at mid-century office buildings with interest.

I do think there is something about this part of the world: I am looking for books now on development in the 40s and 50s on the North Shore so I can learn more about the builders that worked up here. There is some good stuff to see! At the same time, I will be looking at buildings in my other cities with a lot more scrutiny than I used to. There is so much to learn and document.

I think this story is also part of the reason we extended ourselves and bought the house we are remodeling:

In the late 60s my parents lived in La Jolla, CA in one of the houses in the Triad, a Case Study project by Killingsworth. There are pictures of us as kids running around in dressup in the glass hallways. Drawings of this Triad that are in my favorite architectural drawing book (after Frank's, of course) and learned the houses and their wonderful layout from the plans. When we were down there looking at colleges we drove by the house and saw that it has been ruined: the glass atriums had been roofed over, the house had had a dreadful eave added, and as my mom said, the house was included in a show as an example of what NOT to do with a modern house. Imagine a bit of a carbon copy of house C instead of what is there...

Here are some pics from my partner-in-research, Google Maps:

We lived in House B, on the left with the new added ugly eaves.

My parents' friends Mariane and Stuart lived in House C, on the right.

Contrary to what it says on the modern san diego site linked above, the houses were designed as a triad that related to each other, and the two that shared this drive really worked that way. My parents tell stories of dinner parties night after night where they would carry the dining room table back and forth between the two houses. My mom said that M&S, who are still close with my parents, were the best neighbors ever!

Here is the other house across the street in the Triad, House A.

I totally remember the defeated feeling we all felt, sitting in front of that house on a sunny day in 1985. Pictures and stories of living in the glass house were a major part of our childhood, and we all wanted to see it like it was then. I like to think that that feeling has been sitting inside me, gestating. Being re-introduced to these houses (through teaching and the show at LACMA in the early 00s?) nurtured the sense I have now of wanting to learn about and preserve this architecture.

Ooof, gotta go feed the hungry kids. More soon.

a few more houses in wilmette

2010-02-04T14:45:00.000-08:00

Third Street, Wilmette. 1970s

So here is a later house that seems pretty interesting. I'd like to see inside.

Forest Ave, Wilmette.

This must be a pay-the-bills house.

The drawings bear out that indeed, Gutnayer designed it in this style. Look at me, I didn't even get out of the car. What a bias!

Pioneer Lane, Wilmette. 1986.

This is a pretty late house for Gutnayer. One thing I like seeing on these houses is the

bronze aluminum windows--Id like to replace our windows with bronze as opposed to silver. This house has a big dome skylight right in the middle of the roof and a central atrium.

Gutnayer's drawings

2010-02-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

Perspective view of residence, by J. Marion Gutnayer

For the appraisal I photographed typical examples of all the documents that are being donated. I love J. Marion's drawings of his houses, which are usually ink and color pencil on trace, and are found rolled into the tube with the other 6 sheets of plans and elevations.

early 1950's residence in Florida, JM Gutnayer

The trace drawings are more typically elevations like this one with shadows and color pencil and ink additions.

Elevation, graphite, JM Gutnayer

Gutnayer designed a new theater for the Second City Theatre company here in Chicago. As far as I can tell this was not built, at least not with this exterior? What is there is much more traditional.

Perspective sketch, Gutnayer studio

I am not sure who drew this drawing or what project it is for, but I love it. Gutnayer designed some dorms for a college in Ohio, and I think this might have been from that project. Check out that diver!

The Gutnajers in Poland

2010-02-03T09:13:00.000-08:00

I am inventorying the papers so that the appraiser can appraise them and they can move on to new homes. We are applying for a permit now and should hear in about two weeks! So work will begin, and all the papers and drawings will need to move on to new homes.

As part of that appraisal I am counting sheets of paper, which gave me a chance to finally count and gather the many sheets of paper that make up the documentation of Gutnayer's decades-long fight to recover art stolen from his family by the Nazis, and, in particular, an evil opportunistic Dutchman named Pieter Menten. Menten joined the SS in 1941 for what would appear to be the dual purpose of killing Jews and stealing their art. You can read the brief (and incomplete, especially as it pertains to his art collection) Wikipedia entry on Menten here.

Photo: Berhard top left, and Abe bottom (?)
Map: Rough locations of their galleries on a current Google Map image
addresses from survivor accounts and Wikipedia

Bernhard and Abe Gutnajer were significant art and antique dealers in Warsaw. From what I can decipher from Wikipedia and the documentation in the house, Bernhard and Abe were both killed in 1942: Abel was murdered in his apartment on July 21, the day before a major 'deportation'. I will have to go back and confirm this date but I think Bernard was likely killed at the same time. They both had antique shops in the city, not far from each other. Abel exhibited and important Polish art at the time. One of the paintings stolen from him in 1942 recently came up for auction.

Gutnayer on the right, with his parents, brothers, and two unidentified children.

Gutnayer tells an amazing story in his affadavits regarding the restitution of some of his father's collection. He joined the Polish Resistance and, posing as an art dealer, went to Menten's home to review his collection. He described seeing portraits of his grandparents in Menten's home, as well as other pieces from his father's personal collection. He declined to purchase anything from Menten. Menten trip through the justice system is disheartening--he spent a short time in prison in 1949 and Holland would not extradite him to Poland to stand trial. From 1950 to 1976, Menten lived the life of a successful art collector and businessman. His trial was reopened in 1976 and he was convicted for only a portion of his real crimes.

the things

2010-01-26T10:53:00.000-08:00

The Things

by Donald Hall January 4, 2010

When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore—
that I’ve cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial: a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother’s rocker,
a dead dog’s toy—valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother’s souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.

---------------------------

Reed read this poem in the New Yorker and sent it to me. I spent part of this morning preparing the studio for the arrival of Bill Hasbrouck, who will appraise Gutnayer's papers and things before they go on to their new homes. I found a stash of family photos from Poland that I had not seen before, and pieced together Gutnayer's father, mother, brothers. In a desk drawer we found a beautiful series of albums of Alice Gutnayer's father and family: he was a musician who worked with regional orchestras in Europe, and after emigrating here, in the Midwest. Her loving albums of his life and career are quite rich: there appear to be photos of their trip across the Atlantic, and photos of interesting musicians and artists in Europe that I wish I could identify. As I look at these photos and think about what the 30s and 40s were like for Jews in Europe, I am amazed at their persistent creativity. How vastly different our cultural landscape would be if they had not found haven in America and settled here.

other beauties

2010-01-25T11:33:00.000-08:00

These are not Gutnayer houses, but I would love to know who designed them. These two are on the same street, just a few houses away from each other. I drove by them in my search for a house on Kostner in Skokie...never found it. Golf courses are good places to go modern house hunting...these two are some of the best I've seen.

I saw this one first. It seemed empty at first from a distance, but no,

all the furniture sits under the window line in a sunken living room.

Here's another heavy interesting eave.

Lovely proportions on this house, and pretty stone.
There is an abstract metal sculpture mounted next to the front door.

Lincolnwood

2010-01-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

Gutnayer designed at least six houses in Lincolnwood, which is a suburb south of Skokie and east of Evanston. I found four of them easily because Gutnayer usually built on corner sites. The original drawings listed the two intersecting streets, e voila!. Two of the houses eluded me (picture me in my minivan driving up and down street after street of little brick houses) but I will find them somehow. It is still a pleasure to come across these homes. The eaves are quite a signature and are interpreted differently on many of the houses. I appreciate how the eaves reach out to the street and make the house feel more like a gesture than a weighted down thing. The other beautiful aspect of these ranch homes is the use of color. Gutnayer used color, texture and scale in quite lovely ways.

He did a few of these 'shelter' split levels, where one roof covered the entire home.

This is a fairly conventional ranch layout with the added

garage and then the detailing on the eaves.

The brick on this facade is quite beautiful, showing a lot of color.

All of these houses seemed to be in good condition which was great to see!

Lovely eaves and detail again! I like the monochromatic palette

and the subtle detail. Detail and decoration, good!

Wilmette

2010-01-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

We are going to travel north up Sheridan Road into Wilmette to see J. Marion's houses. This house is actually in Evanston, right on the border of Wilmette. To me, this is the most 'modernist' of Gutnayer's houses, in that it does not have visible ranch qualities, and the volume of the house is a simple rectangular form.

The front door detail.

A couple of his houses have these double height doors made of slotted wood,
which is the same wood used on the interior of our house.

The back corner of the house.

I was really pleased when I learned that this was one of Gutnayer's houses.

I have admired it since our first visit to Wilmette.

His signature eave (? please correct me if I have the wrong term)

is lovely, as is his use of color and material. The Gutnayers lived in this house

while they built the house we are renovating.

Classic Gutnayer builder ranch, also on Sheridan,

a few blocks north of the previous house.

Later house, 1970s. This house was on the market

when we bought our house. It has a similar door to the Evanston house.

Central Wilmette

This house has a central atrium I'd like to see sometime. (I have looked at plans for all these houses but not been inside them).

This is also in Central Wilmette. A later house, 70s or 80s?

Evanston

2010-01-23T21:21:00.000-08:00

1420 Chicago, Evanston

Crain & Elmwood, Evanston
designed for/with NAMCO

Grove & Maple, Evanston
designed for/with NAMCO

Chicago & Clark, Evanston
designed for/with NAMCO

Chicago & Greenwood, Evanston

Dobson Street, Evanston
Classic Gutnayer house from the 50s!
Can't wait to photograph this one myself.
--------------

So after driving by many of these projects I have started to go out and photograph them.From going through the drawings with the Wilmette Museum staff and volunteers, we ended up with a spreadsheet of 90 projects and their sites. Where I can I will photograph them, otherwise I will try to use google maps as I did above.

ranch houses and the suburbs

2010-01-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

When we first drove through the neighborhoods west of Green Bay Road and North of Evanston, I said, no way. There is no way we could live here! The houses are too much the same, it is too homogenous...I cannot imagine it. Now, after living in West Wilmette, right in the hard core midst of the 1950s development that built miles and miles of Chicagoland suburbs, well, I love it. It has its own quiet diversity, and as I walk Sadie around and around these streets I find lots to observe and think about. After reading Alan Hess's books, I feel especially drawn to the houses that are unapologetically single story, resting gently on the flat plane of their site in the colors of the land.

Most of the houses in this area are split level ranches. We live in one at our rental, and as you walk around the neighborhood, you see version upon version of the split level.

The loveliest of these houses are brick, red or limestone color, with dark trim. A deep eave also gives these houses a bit more grace.

Playing with a shed roof helps these houses also seem a bit more contemporary and as more of a departure from a traditional form.

These are all within a few blocks of my house. I recently found a cool blog that cataloged some good midcentury buildings and neighborhoods in Chicago using Google maps. Can't wait to visit these. It has inspired me to finish Gutnayer's map with all of his built projects. But first...I'm going to try to visit his projects in this area and photograph them. First up: Wilmette and Evanston.

2010-01-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

So I have been thinking a lot about the fireplace wall and did a few quick photoshop perspectives to represent some of my thoughts. Apologies for the low quality of the photographs. I used my iPhone.

I love the light that comes in from the bedroom. I want to keep that entering the main space.

what is this mystery translucent material?

I love these resin products from 3form. Expensive, but so cool.

I added some solid wood to the right of the stone to represent the secret stair, which will be a permanent stair up to the roof, rather than the pulldown that is there now.

Here the translucent material reveals the stone a bit, for color and texture.

The connection at the top of the stairs is definitely closed.

Here the stone is covered by paneling but there is a peekaboo translucent section into the playroom.

I tried shelves on this wall but it just felt busy and cramped. I think we also might need to consider embracing our inner pink and not covering up the stone.

The brass planter is off and the circular stair no longer blocks the view to the window. It lines right up!!

Aaaaah....

But now the tall central axis seems too tall.

Any reason it needs to be this tall? cut it off? Take it to the ceiling as one of our extra structural supports?

beautiful steel uncovered in the entry.

Can we keep it revealed?

Here's the crazy marble off the dining room table. Again...maybe embracing our inner pink?

I'll try to find some interesting examples of good design using this palette.

au revoir chandelier

2010-01-09T17:37:00.000-08:00

The cast iron pieces that Gutnayer installed in the house left this week. With the help of the state architectural historian Anthony Rubano and Chicago architectural salvage scion Stuart Grannen, we pieced together a bit of the history of the items. The sconces are theatre sconces, hopefully Stuart will find out where from. Gutnayer apparently had four of them, and he took the other two, cut them down and had a base made for the dining room table, which he described as 'turkish bookended marble'. Stuart described the marble on the table as the kind used in building construction, which makes sense given how many leftover construction materials were used in the house! The chandelier was identified by Stuart as probably 1940s, so if it came out of an English Castle (as Gutnayer claimed it did), it must have been a recent purchase. Stuart will pass them on to good homes.

These were still working perfectly with all the bulbs burning after a number of freezing winters.

Harvesting continues!

demo begins

2010-01-06T15:35:00.000-08:00

We are doing the 'harvesting' this week, carefully dismantling all the elements in the house we hope to re-use. It is exciting to see the rooms start to become more anonymous. As we took the last furniture and things out of the house, we both started to feel a little sad for the house and its impending transformation from its original state. The harvesting of materials for re-use feels like breaking us in gently.

Interesting to see that framed-in slatted door. It appears in drawings
of Gutnayer's and I wondered where it had been.

Kitchen, minus all the cabinets and appliances.
We are taking the walls away...I can't wait to see through this room!

Kitchen from the dining room. Note the beam that lands...where?

The kitchen has a dropped roof, and I think what you see here
above the bit of insulation are the roof planks.
They run the opposite direction from the interior ceiling boards.
Those tongue-in-groove members are about 21/2-3" thick.

The lights get a rest after 52 years!
We will re-use all these in the LR and bedroom.

Here are the cabs and the flooring in their temporary home in the garage.
We will reuse some of the cabinets for storage in the basement and utility room.

This is the tongue and groove paneling that lined the kitchen volume.

The likely plan for this is to create a wood surround for the kitchen:

Ooh! Snuck in a design drawing. See the beam coming in from the upper right? That is that same beam from the picture above (the one that lands...where? Now it will land on the steel column). We are getting pretty close on the design, with some really wonderful details I can't wait to share. Friends will note in this view the, ahem, similarity in layout to our old house. The house was essentially lined up in the same kind of configuration as our Seattle house. Take out a couple walls, and voila! As our architect tactfully said, if it worked for you guys before... .

marcel breuer

2009-12-06T20:14:00.000-08:00

So the book finally came in: Architecture without Rules: The Houses of Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard. Marcel Breuer came to the US in 1937, nine years before Gutnayer, to follow Gropius to Harvard. Breuer had studied at the Bauhaus and with Gropius, working in the woodshops of the two schools. He started designing houses with Gropius on his arrival, and worked with Gropius for a number of years. He established his own practice in New York in 1947. In 1951, he had two women working in his office, including one of the first African American woman architects, Beverly Green. Beckhard came into his office in 1951 and started working on major commissions in 1952.

The book has lots of nice photos of some of Breuer and Beckhard's houses with plans, which have been really useful to study in relation to the photographs. First a quote, from the afterword by Stanley Abercrombie:

[his work] also shows, when we look at the examples from the late '30s and early '40s, the originality and vigor with which Breuer greeted his newly adopted American and its construction conventions. The austere forms and anonymous smooth surfaces of European modernism were left behind in the old country, replaced here with durable, low-maintenance, natural maerials (most notably, wood frames, wood siding, and fieldstone) disposed in compositions that were becomingly modest and genuinely functional. These were not traditional houses in modern dress; they were genuinely new houses, thoughtfully planned to accomodate new patterns of living. Breuer invented a type of modern American house that was both more modern and more American than any that existed before it.

I am looking forward to looking at the plans with our architects. Meanwhile, here are some details that caught my eye...

I love this stair with the horizontal railing. There is a beautiful relationship of light and heavy.

This picture captures some of the common features of Breuer's houses: using fieldstone to build walls, glazing that goes floor to ceiling, and planes that push out in to space away from the main volume of the house.

Gutnayer built a massive fireplace in the center of our house. He designed significant fireplaces in a lot of his projects, and I wonder if he had seen Breuer's projects, which won awards and were published at the time. Our fireplace does not have as clear a form as Breuer's fireplaces pictured here. We are discussing ways of improving the form of our fireplace, and I like the prominent reveal in the fireplace on the left, and the asymmetrical volume (which maybe houses the flue?) that sits on top of the fireplace on the right. Lyrical and it activates the area above the fireplace.

Here is ours.

turning back to your joy

2009-12-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

We are starting to look at schemes for the house. Reed and I sit in the house, trying to visualize what will happen when we change what we have. It is imperfect for sure, and it needs to be massaged into something better. I keep thinking about the family that lived in the house before us, and about what it will be like to live there. Was family living in the 50s and 60s that different from how we live now? The ranch house is already less formal than a traditional house...did they really think about daily life differently? From the family's materials left in the house, and the space configuration, it does not look that different from life at this point in time.

As we sift through the drawings and receipts and layers of dust on everything, I think about certain details from his buildings, like the graceful columns, the four narrow bays of his apartment buildings (built narrow as the first multistory building on the block). He added crazy flourishes to the brick and concrete faces of his houses, exaggerated gables that look graceful and right in most cases. He seemed to love decoration and eccentricity: scarves, bolo ties, narrow mustaches, drawings and stories of his life. In a way, what we are looking to preserve are some of his flourishes in the house. In a contemporary modern house, details tend to be so...responsible. Well placed, simple steel and wood, shots of color in orderly tile. It seems that good details are hard, as they require so much follow through (see FLW and Greene + Greene, Mark Mack...when do you stop?).

Our schemes are just at the very open and exciting stage, and here I am talking about details. I think I am trying to articulate the conceptual model of preservation we are building: that is about the spirit of experimentation and casual-ness that exists in the house. Ok, so maybe throwing in all those materials that you found on job sites, maybe a little over the top. But we can work with that. Without being too sober about it, we promise.

Text from Gutnayer's 1957 Christmas card, while the house was under construction.

The drawings on the antipode side represent the Anatomy, Topography, Geography and Technological analysis of the Gutnayer's 1958 Flying Shelter, located on a plateau on Sheridan Road in Wilmette, Ill. (Indians called the place Ouilmette). This residential shelter is anchored temporarily onto vibrated columns of reinforced concrete also called "stilts". The upper part of the building is actually a ranch house floating on the second floor; the upper roof-deck is an extension of the ground-floor garden. I hope that you will soon be able to enjoy with us conventionally all the advantages of this unconventional shelter of our family.

On the antipode side, some drawings of the house made while it was close to completion.

As the house was originally designed the second floor floated over open space on the south side. In 1973 Gutnayer filled that space in and moved his architecture practice into it. The bottom drawing is the rear side of the house, ("as seen by neighbors, whether they like it or not!"). Gutnayer is acknowledging the funky joint of the south side to the north. We hope to resolve and clarify the joint with a stair coming down from the screen porch. The roof garden, complete with shower and sunning porch, is the part we hope to recreate in some very basic way.

South view: check out that boat! The windows are the kids bedrooms.

North view: The stair will be taken down, revealing a little more float in the volume at the front of the house. Not visible in this picture is the shift in material on the facade: it switches from terracotta brick (at the front) to regular brick (toward the back) about halfway along this face. Odd, but in the immortal words of Tim Gunn, we will make it work.

The house at night

2009-11-26T22:12:00.000-08:00

While Kathryn Merlino was here we had our first dinner party in the house! Pizza and wine, but hey, it was a hot meal that we heated up in the oven.

I also had a chance to put in some more light bulbs and take a shot of the house from the outside lit up.

Reed and Kathryn and the kids are in the studio downstairs. In this photo the left corner of the house is missing: I would have to stand in the middle of Sheridan Road to get the whole thing.

The Ranch House

2009-11-26T21:42:00.000-08:00

On my day of checking 15 coffee table books out of the Wilmette Public Library, I checked out The Ranch House by Alan Hess. I read a fair amount of it tonight, amazed to see at every turn the houses that populate mile after mile of the Chicagoland suburbs I live in. Gutnayer designed many modern ranch houses in this area and did development projects throughout his career.

The architectural historian who came to look at his work described him as evolving from the avant garde to 'builder vernacular'. After reading this book, I don't see that so much as a derogatory characterization as much as a transformation that affected many architects throughout the country in the 40s and 50s. New technology was employed to make these houses easy to build and affordable, and modules were used to speed construction and preparation of building materials. Hess' book is from 2004, so I am not sure how much the dialogue in architectural history has changed since then, but I have checked out some more recent books to read more about them.

One thing I was looking for in 'The Ranch House' was the ways in which the homes had been remodeled and whether they maintained their historical pedigree, such as it might have been. Many of the ranch houses in this book (mostly examples in California with interior shots) had been remodeled by their owners, with sensitive additions made or simplifications done on the interior. We are just starting to look at schemes with our architects and I was feeling some remorse about losing some of the interior characteristics of the house. But the more I look at our plans, the more I feel that we will be enhancing the character of the original house. And for many reasons, both budgetary and aesthetic, the outside of the house will not change significantly at all.

More rocket houses on stilts

2009-11-26T21:23:00.000-08:00

Here is a the Villa Dall'Ava by the Office of Metropolitain Architecture: OMA. From the front, lots of connections to our house. No pool in our project though...

The home that gets referenced the most frequently is Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie when people see the house from the outside.

I took out a bunch of books from the library, really anything I could carry out on modernism and ranch houses and found these two projects:

The Cates House, by Julian and Barbara Neski

(from weekend utopia by alastair gordon)

And the Eagle House, 1992, by Dirk Alten

(from Modern House by John Welsh)

The architectural term used for the 'stilts' (which comes from Gutnayer's loving description of his own house as a rocket ranch on stilts) is pilotis. I was looking for ribbon windows and pilotis in my search for houses with a similar character to ours. Some have spiral stairs in the plan, and most have roof gardens or roof spaces. I like the delicate railing on the Eagle House quite a bit, and it has a delicate metal stair in front that was added after this sequence with the shutters was taken. The Eagle house was built on top of a villa's garage, so it is supposed to feel like it dropped down on an unlikely base. I find it interesting that the houses have such light ground floor volumes: my instinct is to make the base of our house all the way around darker to accent the light color and significant volume of the top.

I am also getting a book of the work of Marcel Breuer. His houses have a lot of the modernist ranch to them and I look forward to seeing more than I can find on the web.

Gutnayer visits more modernist beauties

2009-11-22T07:10:00.000-08:00

Photo of Philip Johnson's Glass House

Under Construction. Id like to learn more about this (subfloor?) construction.

No photos of Gutnayer with Johnson. Perhaps he went and saw this without his knowledge?

We'll never know...

It is worth reading this POV, which I found looking for a reference image for this house. It articulates clearly the dilemmas we face with updating our house. Do we keep the kitchen enclosed? Add a green roof to the roof garden? Open up the space and create better access to the windows (which now are divided by a wall and a bookcase)? We feel if we keep the spirit of our 'rocket ranch house on stilts' alive, we are preserving the house. The exterior will not change much at all. The architect's plan is to clarify the architect's original spatial organization and keep it very apparent in the re-design. But we will be moving elements around and simplifying the palette, which the architect seemed to have built with a combination of materials left over from other jobs. Preservation benefits will likely not be ours since we plan to update and improve the house based on its original design.

Name that project:
this project seems as if it was photographed at the same time as the glass house.
Is it another building on the same site? Anyone know what it is?
(update 12/02/09: I am pretty sure this is Johnson's other project
in New Canaan, CT, where his Glass House is: it is called the Wiley Speculative House.)

our architects

2009-11-19T11:04:00.000-08:00

We did end up finally choosing a wonderful architecture firm: Wilkinson-Blender. We found them on the web via the Chicago AIA sites awards categories. They have done some really wonderful projects and a number of green roofs, which was one of our high priorities at the start of this project. It is still a priority, but the triage repair on this poor house may mean that the true green roof is in phase 2 or 3 of our renovation. Check out their portfolio!

the 40s

2009-11-19T11:01:00.000-08:00

So Gutnayer's materials are being sorted for various archives. I love these photos of him visiting significant buildings of the time. I am a bit embarrassed to note that this is the first time I have paid close attention to the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. I have of course looked at their drawings as part of my teaching, but always looked at their work out of context, both historically and physically. Now that we are in the midwest and can look at these projects firsthand, I am learning so much. 'The Goot', as he was affectionately called by his students at UIC, visited the FLW projects in October of 1947. The Johnson project photos are not labeled, so I am not sure that I have the right buildings, but see what you think...

Frank Lloyd Wright and ? name those architects

I think this is a photo of a critique that Gutnayer arranged with Frank Lloyd Wright out at Taliesen. It is mentioned in one of the student newsletters that he kept from his period at UIC.

This photograph is labeled in polish as the Willitt House and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Gutnayer is on the left.

Name that...crypt?

From the leaves on the ground I think this is probably from the same October trip out to visit Taliesen. Anyone know?

labeled: Masselinck chief architect for FLW at Taliesen

Gutnayer in front of Taliesen

Alright, I have to get back to work. Next post will be the Johnson house and a mystery building...perhaps the other structure at the Johnson House? Will need some ID help on that one!

Keeping the Torch of Architecture Burning

2009-11-15T21:47:00.000-08:00

Gutnayer drew christmas cards in ink on vellum and printed them as blueprints every year to send out as Christmas cards. The house figures in each one, as do the kids, Alice, and their activities that year. They are whimsical and so rich with great drawings. He has a symbol of the house as a torch that re-occurs in cards over multiple years.

I have been looking at a lot more of his projects and have started trying to identify them in Google Maps. I am building a public map that you can search for, I think. He did a high rise in Chicago and one in Evanston, and designs for two major highrises on in the 4200 block of Marine Drive that you can see from Lakeshore Drive. Given the volume of drawings in the house for these, I am quite sure they are built, but the Marine Drive project may not be his, I cannot tell yet. I need to go look at it and compare it to the drawings. His buildings seem to consistently have four bays in the front and exterior columns with volume underneath. Our house is consistent with that expression. The other interesting project he worked on was the transitioning of Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building into Roosevelt University in the 1970s. Kathryn and I went to look at this building the other day, and it appears he did a lot of design of infill classrooms, lockers, mechanical, etc. He also designed a small workshop theatre and some other spaces. Now that I have seen the building and understand its significance I cannot wait to go back and look at the drawings. (Me in the studio:"why is this Louis Sullivan photograph in the studio? and why is it in a roosevelt university interior rendering? where is roosevelt anyway?") Obviously my education in Chicago architecture is just beginning. But Kathryn and I got a lot under our belt in a few short hours: the Mies apartment buildings at 860 Lakeshore (just steps from the American Girl Store!), Mies' Crown Hall at IIT, the Auditorium Building, and the Robie house. And those are the ones we got inside, not to mention the many we drove by while kids listened to storytapes in the back seat.

So, the torch of architecture. Gutnayer had a lot of passion for art and design, and he kept it very alive in his work and his personal life. I love the symbolism of the torch. It reminds to be a bit more attentive to keeping energy and excitement active in my own life and work. He lived so fully. We should all aspire to that.

Illinois Heritage

2009-11-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

So today the historic preservation architect came and visited the house. He knew all about the names and dates of the fixtures, the plywood, and so many things. It seems unlikely that we will preserve as much as necessary to receive the landmark property tax freeze, but it was very interesting to learn things about our house from him. And, there is the opportunity for dialog: houses form the 50s are a little harder to nail down in terms of preservation constraints than the late 19th century farmhouse. So we will see...

He identified this lamp, which we have been holding onto, because, why? well, it seemed too sort of big and odd to get rid of. And sure enough: it is (marked on the bottom) as a Laurel lamp designed by Frederick Weinberg. Google these things and some run in the 2-3K range. Wow! Another beautiful thing he identified is the plywood called 'driftwood' on the ceiling of our sun porch, which does look like driftwood, and is an early type of specialized textured ply.

Technology

2009-11-03T21:38:00.000-08:00

J. Marion used state of the art technology in his home. We hope that continues to bode well as we start to peel away the layers of materials to get down to the structural elements. A couple of our favorite elements are his stereo, which had built in speakers in the sideboard in the dining room:

Those who know Reed and remember his speaker system in our old house will understand that this made total sense to us. I will post pictures of the stereo, which is a big box with the turntable inside. It came with construction drawings which I found in the living room storage along with a series of articles about building bomb shelters.

There are two giant dimmers like this one:

They feel wonderful to operate. You can sense the scale by comparing them to the lowly standard wall switches just to the left. This is a serious piece of lighting equipment.

This OSB composition board has caught the eyes of the architects. I love it. They have said that is a pretty early application of this material. It is the wall material in the kids bedrooms.

On Saturday the Illinois Historic Preservation architect comes out to talk to us about what we would need to replace/restore/retain if we were to apply for Landmark status and benefits (a ten year property tax freeze!) We are looking forward to meeting him. We will be holding our breath about the replacement of the blown aluminum windows (the 40 feet of them on the front facade in particular) which is a big ticket item already and could get much bigger if we are required to keep everything quite close to the original. We'll see...

Slow Going

2009-11-03T21:26:00.000-08:00

We are in the process of choosing an architect, working through the choice between two different firms. One is a design/build firm and the other would likely come with a construction manager as part of the process. It is a slow process being thorough about making a balanced choice. They are both great options and it is really hard to choose which way to go. It feels a bit like looking at two big, expensive wrapped gifts and trying to pick one.

So, in the interim, Ive been working on getting J.Marion's papers into safer, drier, warmer places than our house, and it looks like we will have some success. I have found lots of his houses around to drive by,and buildings too. As the dispersal of the images become imminent, we are figuring out what we might like to keep ourselves.

The same questions will come up regarding interior details. Here are some good ones that we hope we can keep, and some that will surely go, but give us a sense of J. Marion and Alice's funky style.

The master bedroom. Lamps and built in headboard with blanket storage and closet on the rear side.

master bath tile.

second bath tile and velvet stripe wallpaper.
J. Marion specified some awesome wallpapers in his projects.
Silver foil sunsets in one kitchen, huge musical notes in another kitchen.

the circular stair.

Even beautiful with white carpet and plastic tread.

Originals

2009-10-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

(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.
--------

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

2009-10-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-07T10:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-06T15:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-05T21:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-05T20:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-05T15:32:00.001-07:00

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.