Long Grove, the environmental capital of Vernon and Ela Townships if not the world, has its own influence on builders.
It makes them do funny things, such as sit on a chair in the middle of the woods in early March.
Bigelow Group president Perry Bigelow, whose local fame stems mostly from building tightly insulated homes to keep the weather out, sat and let nature in unhindered as he pondered the home he would put on a wooded knoll for this year`s ninth annual Parade of Homes, which opens Saturday at the Glenstone subdivision in Long Grove.
”It wasn`t that cold. There wasn`t even any snow on the ground,” he said, dismissing the notion this might be unusual behavior.
Bigelow considered the woods, and he considered a pond beyond the woods, about 30 or 40 feet from the home site.
”I sat here and said, `What ought we to do here?` It`s heavily forested with oak and hickory-huge, fantastic trees,” he said. ”In a house on a site like this, the first thing you plan is the breakfast room, then the family living center.
”When you get up in the morning or come home at night, you spend most of your time in the breakfast room, family room or master bedroom,” he added.
”These are the areas I concentrate on and do something special.”
So Bigelow designed a house with a bank of windows about 50 feet long and 17 feet high stretching across the breakfast room, family room and master bedroom at the back to embrace the trees and pond. And he put an abundance of mirrors in the house to ”extend the woods inside.”
He calls the 4,200-square-foot house, which has a price tag of $760,000
(including furnishings), Treehouse on the Pond.
Bigelow isn`t the only builder in this year`s Parade to feel the spirit of Long Grove`s landscape, which is fiercely protected by a town government dedicated to the good earth.
Bongi Group president Carl Bongi positioned his 4,150-square-foot, $620,000 Carlyle so that from the inside the many-windowed family room would seem to be floating over a pond in the rear as if, he said, it were ”out on a pier.”
His wife, Valerie, the home`s interior decorator, was inspired by the pond`s tranquility to create, just off the family room, a Japanese tea room complete with mats, low table with cushions to sit on and a special cabinet holding utensils for a tea ceremony.
Across the pond, Cambridge Homes chief Richard Brown was moved to fashion outside his 3,236-square-foot, $624,900 Brightwell what he called an English country garden-a tidy oblong of pavement, plants, garden seats and a symmetrically placed tree.
And Peg Russell of C.E. Russell & Assoc. went so far as to suggest that her house, the 4,200-square-foot, $675,000 Connecticut Country, was in a way secondary to its setting, a shady glen bordering the pond opposite Bongi`s Treehouse.
”The house frames the outdoors,” she said.
The impact of the outdoors, and the consequent attention to landscaping, are probably the strongest elements in this year`s Parade, which was shifted to Long Grove after two previous locations were discarded.
The Parade is the Home Builders Association of Greater Chicago`s annual event to promote good will with the public, display its members` talents, raise money for the organization-and, not incidentally, try to sell some luxury homes, which have been moving slowly in the Chicago area. (Several still remain unsold from last year`s Parade in Inverness.)
This year`s show is one of the smallest yet held, with only seven builders participating, down from 13 last year. But the modest size is offset by the graceful setting and the distinctiveness of each home.
Some highlights:
– Bigelow`s Treehouse, faced in a light-colored brick, mottled to suggest age (like some others in the show), is wedged in among existing trees so that they appear to have grown up around the house, rather than the house appearing to have been built among the trees.
”We want people to think the house has been here 90 years,” said John Kamin, Bigelow vice president. The company claims to have developed special techniques in building on wooded sites, and Bigelow said one worker spent most of his time fencing off sensitive areas to keep tradesmen off the woodland floor.
Inside the house, marble in a soft, undulating brown tone paves the ground floor from foyer to breakfast room, and its color is picked up by oak woodwork stained a champagne color. The quiet tones echo the tranquility of the woods.
Bigelow expresses scorn for splashy decorative effects. ”The problem with gaudiness and ostentation is they cause the people to be lesser,” he said. ”I design for comfort and enjoyment. I want elegance, but I don`t want it to be overwhelming.”
On the second floor an ample gallery overlooks the family and breakfast rooms, as does an interior window from the master suite. These upper rooms also look out on a paved courtyard that spreads in flowing curves through the woods behind the house.
Another unusual feature in the suite is a loggia, or pillared gallery, between the bedroom and bathroom, designed to provide a transition between the areas and draw the eye from the alluring outdoors, according to Bigelow.
– Columns are also a feature of Bongi`s Carlyle, notably the four fluted wooden pillars soaring two stories to support an extended entry porch. The pillars are balanced by a venerable oak in the front yard, giving the approach to the house a certain theatrical grandeur.
Inside, spaciousness is achieved through the opening up of sight lines throughout the lower level, so that the pond in the rear can be seen from the foyer. Light colors and the home`s 101 windows create a sense of transparency. Upstairs, extra-wide hallways and a curved wall express gracious amplitude.
At the same time the use of columns, even in the kitchen, and pilasters around the family room fireplace add formality. ”To get openness and yet be very formal, that`s almost a contradiction,” said Bongi. ”Usually an open plan makes everything one big room.”
– No entry has more columns than Fiduccia`s 3,850-square-foot, $620,000 New Hampshire Country Estate, which offers a total of 23 in a construction that attempts to blend rustic with rococo.
The exterior combines lap cedar siding painted gray with split granite around the front door and in a massive, protruding chimney bay that dominates the facade.
Inside, an almost Roman splendor presides. The columns in the parlor and dining room, along with wall borders that suggest a Pompeian villa, convey intimations of a toga-clad feast.
On the other side of the foyer lies the master suite, with a pillared entry, an anteroom to heighten the sense of a stately progression to one`s private chambers and a tub room-not a mere bathroom, mind you-whose columns are painted in plum colors with black veins.
The sensuous decor of the tub room-rococo is builder Vince Fiduccia`s word-is amplified by the lavish use of $10,000 worth of red granite tile. ”I put big bucks in it,” Fiduccia said.
Other elements emphasizing the intricacy of the interior detailing are a filigree-like double-access stairway rising in the 27 1/2-foot-high foyer and an octagonal anteroom, leading to the upstairs secondary bedrooms, that has a border of dentil moldings at the top of the wall. Heavy moldings with unusual stains and placements are also found elsewhere in the house.
”All my homes have elegant trim,” Fiduccia said. ”That`s my niche market. People want more detail to bring some life into a home.”
– At the opposite pole of home building aesthetics stands Peg Russell, vice president of C.E. Russell & Assoc., whose Connecticut Country expresses the ”less is more” philosophy or, as she puts it, Paul Klee rather than Rembrandt.
”Our houses are defined by what we don`t put in as much as what we do,” she said. ”We`re minimal. We just want to give you a hint, let you expand your thought process. The home is like a cottage, a refuge to get away from everything else.”
Russell eschews the impressive entry; the small foyer leads directly into a modest living room with a fireplace in rough, pitted cork stone. ”Many people identify marble and ornate things with class,” she said. ”I like touch-feel textures. That`s richness to me.”
Along the same lines, the master bedroom is paneled in gray-washed knotty pine and the master bath tile has a rough, pebbly surface.
Rather than being used to aggrandize the foyer, the stairs are back by the kitchen and family room. ”People have gotten into making stairs an object of adornment, not something functional,” she said. ”Ours are for use.”
Upstairs, sharply angled windows and rooms with unexpected corners and niches offer surprises and add to the home`s rambling feel.
If there is any similarity between the Fiduccia and the Russell houses, it is in the intentional built-on look and the mix of exterior materials. Where the Fiduccia house uses stone and siding, the Russell house contrasts siding with shingles.
In both cases, the stylistic antecedents are the traditional New England dwellings in which an original core was added onto, perhaps using a different material, when the need for a larger house arose.
– In a more subdued fashion, Landmark Homes` 3,530-square-foot, $487,000 Plan 531 adheres to the same tradition, with a triple-dormered wing extending out from the primary structure.
As in most Landmark Homes, the characteristic feature is the woodwork, custom-milled fluted casings with rosette corners around doors and windows and panel moldings on the walls.
Landmark president Peter Bianchini said the idea for the woodwork came from his father, who built for his mother a replica of 1900-vintage Connecticut farmhouse with authentic interior trim. ”It`s what I had when I was growing up,” he said.
The variations from traditional design are subtle, tending toward the opening up of the family room/kitchen area at the rear through wide doorways and expanded window areas. The rear of the house is further unlocked through access to an octagonal deck.
Bianchini voiced the belief that his homes` quiet style translates into livability. ”The majority of people want pizazz and detailing, but not something unnatural,” he said. ”A home is not just oohs and aahs.”
– Cambridge`s Brightwell is also quiet and cozy, but with more frills and flounces and an emphasis on special spaces. Among those are a flagstone-floored sunroom leading to the little country garden, a sitting room with balcony off the master bedroom and gazebo on the deck only a few feet from the house, overlooking the pond.
The gazebo, said Cambridge president Brown, was an afterthought, added to provide an additional space for entertaining.
– While all the homes have distinct character, the most obvious stylistic renegade is Designers & Builders` 5,000-square-foot (with finished walkout basement) $596,000 Chase, a turreted Victorian confection that wouldn`t be out of place on a windswept cliff overlooking the sea.
Actually, it is on a rise overlooking a pond separate from the one which the other houses surround, and can get a brisk west wind coming across a valley where horses graze.
Outside, it is marked by a witch`s hat tower surmounted by a weathervane, narrow, looming chimneys and gingerbreak scrollwork. Inside, dark oak trim-a pronounced exception to the trend toward lighter stains-leaded glass and a long, narrow corridor with stairs on the second floor add to a sense of mystery.
”All the wood gives a feeling of warmth, makes it comforting and inviting,” said Betty Kolba, vice president of Designers & Builders. ”Our clients like the dark stain,” she added.
The walkout basement, leading to a patio by the pond, has a dark-paneled bar and its own kitchen.
Unusual interior spaces such as the step-down upstairs corridor, with a skylight overhead and transoms at either side giving light to two secondary bedrooms, are part of the Victorian charm, Kolba said.
”We like to do creative things,” she added. ”It`s a lot of fun to have an architectural fling.”
