Nancy Nelson started talking about the bathtub almost before she opened the screened door of her house.
”I finally found it, with the real claw feet. . . . It was in this garage in Tinley Park, they have all these tubs piled there, you really have to look, and there it was, exactly what we`d been looking for; I was so excited.”
When she gets excited, Nancy Nelson bubbles like an Alka-Seltzer dropped into a glass of water, and finding the right thing–exactly the right thing
–for her house will bring the bubbles almost every time.
This house has been an obsession, a love, a cause, an avocation, ever since she and her husband, Roger, happened to drive past it almost 15 years ago.
Built in Wheaton sometime during the 1870s, it had become run-down and spooky-looking. An elderly woman who owned the house for many years kept a hearse parked in front; the reason, as the story went, was to discourage other cars from parking on the street.
A fire took its toll, damaging parts of the house. Weeds and overgrown bushes shrouded the shabby exterior. Little kids walking to and from nearby Longfellow School were sure the house was haunted and talked about it with big eyes.
When the Nelsons drove by it for the first time, all Nancy could see was the house as she thought it should be: refinished to its former Victorian splendor.
”We were living in Downers Grove, but my husband worked in Wheaton; so we were in the town a lot. The first time I saw it, it was like I felt an instant connection. It was such an emotional thing. I kept coming back and looking at it. It was almost creepy.”
The house remained occupied. In 1977, the Nelsons and their two boys, Eric, 14, and Daniel, 11, moved from Downers Grove to a house they built in West Chicago. But she kept going back to Wheaton and looking at the house she loved.
”I would get bothered; I realized I had such a beautiful home with things that worked and conveniences and luxuries, but I couldn`t break that connection.”
Occasionally, she would peek in the front window. She`d see an ornately carved fireplace, decorated with tiles and mirror. One of the tiles at the top was imprinted with the image of a little girl`s face. Nancy would learn later that the tile was a memorial to a little girl who had once lived in the house, and that the fireplace surround had been ordered and shipped from China around 1900.
The obsession with the house grew. ”I had a friend who was in the real estate business, and I said, `If this house ever comes on the market, I`m in trouble because I have to have it.`
”Then one morning, he called me. He said, `You`re in trouble.` I went to look at it immediately. But I felt that I knew exactly what I was going to see before I went in. I wasn`t disappointed. I went home and called my husband. He said, `If you want it that much, we`ll buy it.` ”
In August, 1984, the Nelsons became the fourth owners of the house.
Since then, Nancy estimates she has spent about 80 percent of her non-sleeping hours working on the house.
”I want people to walk in here and think, `This was the way the house was when it was built.` I want the feeling like you`ve stepped back in time.
”Look at that staircase, that`s one of my favorite things in this house. I love the design of it. I think about all the people who walked down that stairway a hundred years ago, how they looked. Long skirts, hair up on their heads, little skinny shoes that buttoned up.”
Getting the house back to its former elegance translates into a lot of research and a lot of shopping.
Typical was the case of the dining room chandelier.
She wanted a chandelier that was Victorian but not gaudy, and she looked for two years before she found it in Michigan.
”This was a little man in Michigan who collected these things as a hobby. We got there . . . first, he wouldn`t agree to see us until we convinced him we were not dealers. Then we had to tell him just what we were looking for. It was like a counseling session, as though we were going to adopt a baby.
”Finally he took us down to his basement, where there were gobs of different chandeliers in different stages of restoration. There was nothing I wanted, and I just kind of stood there for a while, embarrassed, and said,
`Well, everything is beautiful, but there`s nothing for my dining room.`
”Then he said he thought he had what I wanted, but it was boxed. He went into his garage and I got very nervous, thinking, now this man is going to go to all this trouble of unboxing something and I`m not going to like it. He wouldn`t even let me see it until he put it together and hung it.
”I loved it.”
The case of the front doors was as traumatic.
The original front doors had been long gone and replaced with Mediterranean-style doors. Nancy bought antique doors with flash glass panels (the red flash glass was made with gold) at a flea market and had them remilled and installed.
Then someone slammed the door too hard and the flash glass broke.
”Roger and I were out of town; my mother was taking care of the boys. When we got home, she was standing in the middle of the driveway, crying. She was so upset; she knew how much those doors meant to us.”
Nancy called glass artist Susan Manalli of Naperville, whom she had heard about through a hairdresser. Manalli redesigned the pieces of glass, and the result was doors even lovelier than the original. Manalli, who also designed the dining room windows, then took the leftover pieces of flash glass and designed a kitchen cabinet door with them.
Not all the attention has gone to furnishing details.
One of the first things the Nelsons did was tear off the back wall of the house to enlarge and modernize the kitchen, which now has a spacious eating area.
Nancy`s research included not only what to put into the house, but how the exterior of the house had probably looked when it was built. She and her husband decided it must have been built with a wraparound porch; so Roger Nelson and carpenter John Narr from Geneva built one.
”After we were just about through with the porch, the doorbell rang one day, and it was a man who introduced himself as Grote Reber, the grandson of the people who built the house. He lives in Australia but was back for a visit and had seen what we were doing. He said he remembered the house as having a porch almost exactly like what we had added,” Nancy says.
Although she can spend two years trying to find just the right chandelier for the dining room, other items came almost sight unseen and fit right in.
The oval dining room table came from the Chalice Antique Shop in Downstate Mt. Olive, and the Nelsons bought it strictly on trust. ”The dealer (Skip Hastings) specializes in Victorian walnut, and he`s a wizard. He described it over the telephone, and we bought it,” she says. ”It`s exactly what we wanted.”
Likewise, she was able to tell the Country Mates shop in New Buffalo, Mich., the colors she wanted in a wreath for the front of the house (mauve, teal and rose), and they prepared just what she had in mind.
But mostly, it has been a lot of time spent on everything–and a share of ”down time.”
”You burn out occasionally,” Roger says. ”I`m not as fussy as Nancy, but I`ve learned to be tolerant. And I`ve enjoyed seeing Nancy enjoy herself so much.”
”You do sometimes get tired of all the looking,” she says. ”You go into store after store and search and search. Sometimes it seems like everything is so difficult. Like the bathtub. It`s not like going to Sears and buying a tub; it`s hunting it down. I can`t be satisfied with something that doesn`t hit me. It has to click.”
When it does click, it looks like it was always meant to be there, and then it`s worth it.
”I think this was a very happy house, and we`re making it into a happy house again,” she says. ”I would have loved to have lived back then.”
CURIOSITY LEADS TO A THRIVING CAREER IN STAINED-GLASS
Several years ago, Susan Manalli designed a stained glass window for a beauty shop in Wheaton in exchange for $500 worth of haircuts, frostings and perms (”Who could turn down something like that?” she says.), and that, ultimately, is how Nancy Nelson found her.
Nancy and Roger Nelson had recently bought their old Victorian house in Wheaton. One day, while Nancy was getting her hair cut, the conversation drifted to the house`s restoration and Nancy`s need for stained glass. The beautician said, ”There`s someone I want you to meet.”
The Nelsons soon were added to Manalli`s list of customers.
”Roger and Nancy had found a stained glass transom that had been boarded up. . . . I refurbished that,” she says. After that came design work on the red flashed doors the Nelsons bought, and then creating a window-cabinet combination for the dining room.
In 12 years, Manalli has become known in the western suburbs for her artistry with glass. Her kitchen calendar is filled with names of the people with whom she is presently working; pasted underneath the calendar are little slips of yellow paper with the names of people who are waiting their turn for her time.
”It`s a career I didn`t aim for. I think of myself as a wife and mother of three kids,” she says. ”I figure people I see in the grocery probably think I`m always grocery shopping and people I play tennis with think that`s what I do. . . . Sometimes it`s difficult for me to realize everything that`s happened.”
The career she didn`t aim for started when her husband, Hank, was working with a company that handled imported glass. ”He was calling on glass stores and he got real interested (in stained glass). So he taught himself how to
(make stained glass items).
”We were living in a condo in Glen Ellyn, and I was pregnant with our second child. He was doing all this real neat stuff with this beautiful glass in the dining room. I said, `Teach me how you do that.`
”Within three weeks, we had a business going. He designed a line of stained glass terrariums that were affordable for the modest home. I was making them, and he was filling the orders.”
Overhead was low: Because of Hank`s job, they could get the glass at cost, and they were doing the work right at home.
After a while, however, the team effort shifted. ”Hank said, `Susan, you can do the design work yourself.` Me? In school, I had always been good at science and math and scared to death of the art students. But I started doing it, and it took me four years to understand that my designs were having a big effect on my business, that people wanted me and my designs.”
Hank left the business. The Manallis moved from Glen Ellyn to Wheaton and more recently to Naperville; but the work is still done at home.
For Susan, it`s art on art.
”The glass itself is an art. You could take some of this beautiful glass and just frame it and have a piece of art. But then to design it, that`s another art. And it`s art that you know is going to increase in value; stained glass doesn`t discolor. And I don`t think the love and knowledge of stained glass is a fad that`s going to pass, like macrame.”
And stained glass doesn`t mean a church-like atmosphere, she emphasizes.
”A lot of women will say, `My husband doesn`t want a church window.` Glass is so versatile; there`s no end to what you can do with glass. I love it when the men get caught up in it, when they start talking about color and design and balance.
”I tell Hank I`m waiting for the day when I walk into someone`s house and they say, `The sky`s the limit.` I can`t imagine how wonderful that would be.”
