now you see it now you don't

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.

structural corrections

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

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.

Plans

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.

au revoir chandelier

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

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... .