Their apartment in one of the most beautiful historic buildings in Chicago has become a showcase for the treasures that Rose and Matthew J. Lamb have collected on their travels.
”Your home is a background for your interests,” says Mrs. Lamb, a warm, pleasant woman who enjoys talking about her home. ”We collect from all over the world; so it`s a place to show our paintings, antique furniture, bronzes and other things.”
The Lambs have been to England, Japan, France, Austria, Israel, Italy, Bali, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, among other places, where they have shopped for unique mementoes.
”We use the apartment for entertaining. We do a lot of charitable and some political entertaining. We have hundreds and hundreds of people through here all the time,” Mrs. Lamb continues.
Lamb is chairman of the board of Blake-Lamb Funeral Homes Inc. Appointed a Papal Knight of the Holy Sepulchre by Pope John Paul II in January, 1985, and a member of the board of trustees of Saint Xavier College, he and his wife frequently open their home to charitable events.
”We`ve had the Papal Knights from all over the world here. The most we`ve had in this apartment is 208, for a reception for Jannis Vakarelis, a concert pianist, as a celebration of Greek culture,” says Mrs. Lamb.
Although much of their collection is valuable, the Lambs ignore the possibility of damage. ”We decided we just simply wouldn`t worry about things like that, and we`ve never had a burn or a scratch,” says Mrs. Lamb. ”We think fine antiques should be enjoyed and not hidden away.”
Erected in 1912, the building they live in is French Second Empire in style and is as elegant as anything on a grand Parisian boulevard. It has influenced their mutual tastes in new directions.
”When we first married, our taste was so simple and plain. We didn`t want any carving or curlicues. When we got in here, everything kind of fell into place from all those years of traveling and seeing fine homes because the building lent itself to that,” says Mrs. Lamb.
The building was designed by Benjamin H. Marshall, who also did the Drake, the Blackstone and the Edgewater Beach Hotels.
Prominent Chicagoans who have made their homes here include John Shedd, A.B. Dick, Eugene Pike, Dr. Arthur Dean Beaver and Marshall himself.
”In fact the apartment we have was Marshall`s,” says Lamb. ”There was originally one apartment per floor. There have been four units (per floor)
since World War II. In 1977 it was turned over to Bob Sheridan, and he converted it. The same year it was cited as a National Historical Landmark.” The Lambs` home originally was two apartments converted to one, and they have since bought an adjoining third apartment. They owned the original living space for eight years. ”At first we rented it out to a French bank. They were using it for receptions and for the president to stay in when he was in town,” says Lamb. ”Four years ago last fall, we moved down here from our other home in Oak Lawn. A year ago fall we put the two apartments together.” Lamb was featured in the June issue of Nation`s Business as one of five men who run outstanding family businesses in the United States. He has been honored by federal and local governments for his charitable works,
nevertheless he finds the energy to be a crackerjack do-it-yourselfer.
”The first thing I did was put this fireplace in,” he says, referring to a massively ornate Victorian one, focus of the living room. ”It came from a home just outside London. I found it at Stanley`s, a now-defunct Chicago antique shop,” he says.
To restore the apartment to its original splendor, he put in three ceilings. Although they look like the real Victorian thing, they are reproductions by Decorator`s Supply in Bridgeport.
”I had never done anything like the ceilings before,” he says. ”The living room was just a big, big room, 28 feet across and 54 feet long. So what you had to do is bring it (the viewer`s perspective) in. Create an optical illusion, so you`re looking inward rather than outward, to make a big room much more intimate.”
An English-type ceiling in the living room, consisting of a central medallion with a rectangle of beading along the perimeter of the room helped do that.
”The medallion is plaster. It goes on with screws. The beading again is plaster, goes on with an adhesive, then you paint over it,” Lamb says.
In the course of his interior work, Lamb discovered that the rooms were not exactly straight.
”As people would redo these apartments they would put ceilings over ceilings and walls over walls. In the library there were three complete ceilings. As you would break through one you would come upon another. The same in the bedroom. As we knocked out one wall there was another, completely papered, behind it. It was really like an architectural dig.
”What we had to do was `straighten` the whole room out. Nothing is really square because everything was done by hand. The plaster was one-eighth to five-eighths inch thicker at one end,” he says.
”The living room was nothing; we did the whole thing in a day. As for the library, that was the beast of ceilings; one of those things you suffer through and are glad you did it, but you`d never do it again,” he says. It is an Italian baroque ceiling, very ornate, a series of octagons and stars.
”We had to put a 1-inch-by-6-inch-long board all the way across and attach it with toggle bolts for strength. And then we screwed the octagons onto the 1-by-6`s. Then we filled in with plaster of Paris between the little lines,” Lamb says.
”I had a fellow named Ed Savalonis, a carpenter, work with me. There`s no one around that does that kind of ceiling work anymore. It wasn`t that we wanted to do it that way. At Decorator`s Supply they had never seen that ceiling put up. They had always sent it out of the country,” says Lamb.
Lamb also took down all the eight intricate crystal chandeliers in the apartment, took them apart to clean and restring them, and then rehung them.
”It just takes time,” he says of projects such as these. ”That was a two-year job. It was a kind of hobby I did everytime I had a chance.
”We put the crystals in the dishwasher,” he adds, and he was foresighted enough to take photos of the chandeliers before taking them down. ”I needed the pictures to put them all back together again after cleaning,” he says.
Lamb has indulged his love for fine wood paneling in his apartment.
Lining a long hallway in the apartment is elegant oak paneling from a home in Scotland. ”We bought it from a picture from a fellow named Adrian Purdy in Cheltenham, England. We knew we wanted linenfold,” he says, naming a paneling pattern.
The paneling was shipped by Purdy to the port of London, then it went to New Orleans.
From there, ”it was sent to Customs at 76th and Cicero and went around the world for a year by mistake,” Lamb says. ”It was put in the wrong container and was put on a ship.
”It went to Galveston, Tex., and then went down to South America, then to Africa, and ended up back in New Orleans. Then it turned up at 76th and Cicero again, and I told them to hold it, I was coming to get it.”
He found the wood had lost most of its moisture and was almost white. ”I had it in one of the garages at the funeral home,” says Lamb, where he kept bathing it in linseed oil until it regained its beauty.
Outstanding among Lamb`s treasures are the beautiful 150-year-old curved oak doors, which came from France. ”Those were given to Bob Jones University, North Carolina,” he says. ”The university was remodeling and took the doors out. Those were just as dry as a bone. We kept oiling them for a couple of years.”
The Lambs decorated their apartment themselves, and because they purchased things in their travels, nearly every piece has an anecdote attached to it.
The sheer curtains in their living room were all mailed from Greece, where Mrs. Lamb bought them. ”It comes in five different packages and you wonder if the fifth package is ever going to arrive,” says Lamb.
”But they`ve always arrived,” he adds. ”These things give us so much pleasure. Each of these things reminds us of the trip and the people we`ve met.”
In the library is a standing lamp from Portugal that also came in five different packages. ”One came every other month,” says Lamb. ”It`s a pattern that is a copy of an antique one, with little animals. We had a set of china made to match.”
Also from Portugal are the two gilded dressers in the master bedroom.
”One is from Lisbon, and the other from the port city of Faro,” Lamb says with a chuckle. ”We got them 100 miles apart.”
In the living room on a table before the fireplace is a sculpture by Pascal, ”a great friend of Art and Virginia Conrad, very close friends. The tabletop it sits on we got in Agra, made of the same material the Taj Mahal is. The Chinese base is from Hong Kong,” says Lamb.
The massive display cabinet, a Ronweber, in the living room contains quite a few of their travel mementoes: a handsome antique belt originally worn by English officers in India, with a secret place to put messages in, was found in an antique shop in Bath, England; a hand-carved card case English women would put their calling cards in, made in China for the English trade, was bought in Israel. It also contains a Baccarat glass from which Napoleon drank; a Chinese opium pipe; Rosenthal Christmas plates from Sweden; and elongated porcelain figurines of card players by ”The Master Martini,” from Florence, Italy.
The Lambs have not always traveled under the most pleasant conditions. They arrived in Zambia when martial law was declared. Their guide deserted.
”In Zambia the only others in the airport were mercenaries with machine guns, surrounded by tanks,” he says.
The couple also spent six weeks in Peru while it was under martial law.
”We arrived the same day as the tanks in Lima,” he says. (Lamb has received the Order of Chasqui, an ecclesiastical award from the Peruvians for his work with the Catholic missions there.)
Two special loves of Lamb are Oriental carpets, which he says he has always collected, and bronzes. He has a few of the latter by Chicago-area sculptor Hy Levins.
Asked what influenced him as a collector, Lamb replies immediately, ”My grandfather. His house was always a wonder to me as a child. He was a collector, too. His name was Matt Lamb also. He was in the tea and coffee business, Lamb`s Tea Co. at 37th and Union.
”This was going back to the turn of the century. If he`d buy so many bins of tea, then the Chinese would send him one of these lamps or tables as premiums.”
A piece he inherited from his grandfather was an August Moreau lamp, French from the 1890s. ”We saw one of these being auctioned off for $4,000,” says Lamb. ”I realized I had one here in one of our funeral homes and we`d stuck it in a pond and had water coming out of it,” he laughs.
It was quickly ”rehabilitated.”
His most important purchase?
”The first thing we didn`t buy, and it`s colored my whole life,” he replies with good humor. ”We spent the last cent we had plus a little more on our honeymoon to Hawaii in 1954. We had gone to a convention first in Seattle. My father said, `Yes, go now, and enjoy it. You don`t know yet how quickly the first of the month comes around.` ” Lamb says.
The honeymooning couple went window-shopping in Honolulu.
”A painter named Leetag of Tahiti had been killed the day before on his motorcycle,” says Lamb. ”In the window of this shop was the most beautiful painting on black velvet of a man blowing a conch horn, and we found out it was by him. It was $500. All we had in the bank back home was $400. We thought we would borrow the rest of the money but we didn`t.
”The Conch Blower has gone on to be world-famous. The last time it changed hands, it went for something like $200,000, and the paintings that had been selling for $5 and $10 are something like $25,000 now. Leetag became the Rembrandt of black velvet painting. Why we didn`t buy one of the smaller things I don`t know.
”So I wrote to the dealer that had his things and got a picture of the Conch Blower. I keep it over my bed at my other apartment in Oak Lawn,” he says, ”so that every day I could be reminded of opportunity lost” and of his collecting philosophy that it`s only the things you love and don`t buy that you forever regret.
