You’re a typical apartment renter and, until now, you’ve been quite happy with your digs. But you’ve just come back from visiting your friend’s rented coach house and you’re feeling a bit envious. More than a bit.
After all, how many renters in the heart of the city can boast of peace, quiet, distance from intrusive neighbors and a lawn? How many can flaunt a one-of-a-kind residence? And how many can whisper of a cozy hideaway that, in many cases, isn’t even visible from the street?
For the average renter, these are pipe dreams. But for the fortunate few who rent coach houses, they’re happy, everyday realities.
Today’s coach house resident may well muse about his domicile’s ties to its equine past. Around the turn of the century, some homes in Chicago and its near-in suburbs came equipped with a 19th-Century version of a garage. Known as the coach or carriage house, the structure stood in the back yard and was used to store carriages and to board horses. Often, these small buildings came complete with loft areas that were used for saddles, feed and other necessities of the horse-drawn era.
A century later, many of the coach houses that remain have undergone extensive conversion into residences. Along with other back-yard homes that never served as coach houses but offer much the same advantages and are often called by the same name, they’ve become one of the most sought-after commodities in today’s Chicago-area rental market.
Take it from Alex Cermak, a leasing agent for the Evanston office of The Apartment People, a full-service rental agency that helps renters find and lease apartments. “I’ve been here three years, and in that time we’ve had maybe two coach houses (to show renters),” he said. “They’re such desirable places to live in that often they’re passed on by word of mouth. The ones that do get advertised are often very small. The really fabulous ones you never hear about.”
What’s the primary appeal of a coach house? For most renters, quiet solitude is one of the lures, said Abbey Schrager, marketing director for The Apartment People in Chicago.
“A lot of people are steering away from complexes,” said Schrager, whose office has placed renters in about 25 Chicago coach houses this year. “They see coach houses as places that have their own entrances and usually have yards. Often, the coach houses are burrowed behind a home. They’re off the street so there’s a lot of privacy.”
In addition, she said, most renters view the coach house as a single-family home, but at a more affordable rental rate. And like other single-family homes, pets are generally more welcome than they are in many apartment complexes.
But downsides also exist in renting a coach house. They tend to be more expensive–about 10 to 15 percent higher, estimated Schrager–than a comparable-sized apartment. You also may wind up doing more of your own maintenance in a coach house than you would in an apartment, though that will vary with the landlord. And though some coach house residents are chummy with the people in the main building, renters don’t have quite the same easy access to neighbors that they do in an apartment complex or community.
That’s been one of the positives for Peter Orr, a master’s-degree student in mathematics at the University of Chicago. This summer, Orr moved into a $950 a month, turn-of-the-century white frame coach house near the Ravenswood “L” line’s Paulina stop on the North Side. Situated behind a three-flat, the house has a kitchen and living room on the lower level, with a bedroom and an 8-by-10-foot study on the upper level.
After living in a cramped apartment in New York City, Orr, 28, welcomed the chance to spread out in an actual house. “You have the ability to have people over,” he said, noting that his wood plank front porch is big enough to accommodate a couple of chairs and a barbecue grill. “It’s larger than the postage stamp apartment I had in Manhattan. There’s also solitude. It’s very quiet. And it has a hell of a lot of charm.”
Sharing a laundry room in the three-flat with renters in that building, he has come to know his neighbors, and has been invited over to watch football.
While he welcomes the friendliness of the apartment dwellers, he also relishes the chance to retreat to his out-of-the-way home.
“There’s a certain hermit nature that has to run through the coach house resident,” he said. “It’s the perfect place to study if you need to.”
Tim Allwardt, president of Chicago’s Aegis Properties Corp., has owned the three-flat and coach house for about eight years. At the time of purchase, he was given to understand the coach house dates from the 1890s and was originally used for a horse and carriage. It may have been built at its present location, or could have been moved back from a spot closer to the street when the three-flat was built in the 1920s, he said.
Whatever its exact origins, it’s in demand today. “The coach house creates privacy and it has uniqueness,” Allwardt noted. “The combination of those two things means that whenever it’s available, it’s generally rented in less than a day.”
That’s about the length of time it took Bridget Tuft, 28, and her husband, Mike, 33, to sign the lease for their Lakeview-area coach house in May. The couple was seeking one or two-bedroom apartments in the $1,000 to $1,300 range when The Apartment People representative asked if they’d be interested in a coach house. “We weren’t specifically looking at coach houses, but once we saw it, we took it the next day,” said Tuft.
The $1,250-a month, two-story, dove gray frame house is hidden from view from the street, and is accessed though a gate attached to the front structure, a brick two-flat. Inside, an open floor plan combines a living room/dining room and a kitchen, while almost the entire upper floor is a bedroom. There’s a full bath on the main floor and a half bath upstairs. The house also has a full basement that’s only partially beneath ground. “We love it; it’s wonderful,” said Tuft. “We moved out of a 300-unit apartment building with noisy neighbors. This is very quiet. We were (initially) concerned about alley noise, because we’re off an alley, but we haven’t noticed much noise.”
And the home’s uniqueness? “We brag about it all the time,” said Tuft with a laugh. Landlord Allyson Metcalf, who bought the coach house in 1992, said the structure was built prior to the two-flat, and may have been used as a temporary residence while the apartment building was being constructed in the first decade of this century.
“It’s been phenomenally easy (to rent),” Metcalf said. “It lends itself to young couples without children because of the open layout of the upstairs master suite.”
One veteran of out-back living is Julie Campbell, who has resided in a small, one-story frame house in the back yard of a matching frame bungalow on Chicago’s Northwest Side for four years. The house has none of the history of a traditional coach house, having been built as a guest house for in-laws when the bungalow was constructed around 1947.
Campbell’s house has a sizable living room and kitchen as well as a small bathroom and two tiny bedrooms. One of the bedrooms is used as a study, the other is just large enough for a bed and two dressers. She has a storage space in the basement of the bungalow and parks her sport utility vehicle in her tenant’s two-car garage. Her laundry room is a nearby Laundromat.
A post office letter carrier with a route in Chicago, Campbell was living in an apartment in River Grove and delivering mail to her current landlords when she was told that their then tenant was moving out. “I was joking and said, `Well, when do I move in?’ The first thing they said was `We’d love to have you.’ “
Campbell, 34, jumped at the opportunity and hasn’t looked back. “The main reason I like living here is it’s so different from apartment living,” she observed with a laugh. “I can crank my stereo and don’t have to worry about people above or below me.”
She also has maintained a good relationship with her landlords, to whom she still delivers mail. She occasionally goes out to breakfast with the retired couple, exchanges gifts with them in the “big house” on Christmas morning, and turns over her cat to them when she’s on vacation.
“They’re pretty much the sweetest people I know,” she said. “They’re kind of like parents to me.”
`COACH HOUSE’ OR `BACK BUILDING’?
How many of today’s rental coach houses actually served as 19th Century shelters for carriages?
According to Don Martin, president of Seminary Properties and Management in Chicago, many of the buildings now referred to as coach houses never served that purpose. They started out as inexpensive shelters for people, not coaches and horses.
“They used to build these in the 1870s and 1880s,” said Martin, whose properties include four coach houses on Chicago’s North Side. “They were modest buildings that stood closer to the street. As financial circumstances improved for the families owning them, they were moved back on the lots and the larger buildings now in front were constructed.”
These “back buildings,” as Martin calls them, are more commonly seen in Lakeview and neighboring North Side communities than they are in neighborhoods nearer downtown. And that’s no coincidence, Martin said.
“My understanding was that after the Chicago fire, the city outlawed (frame) balloon construction, which allowed fire to shoot up interior walls with nothing to stop it,” he said. “People who could only afford frame houses moved farther out to what were then suburbatn areas like Lakeview, where that construction wasn’t outlawed.”
Thus, he said, the back buildings of Lakeview and nearby neighborhoods tend to date from the two decades following the fire. The larger residences standing in front of them were in most cases built a generation later, from 1890 to 1915.
Several signs serve as possible tipoffs that structures were originally built as modest residences, not coach houses, Martin said. “Usually, the back building is frame, while the front building is a nice brick or graystone,” he noted. “And the back building will usually have pine floors with a 3-inch width to the floorboards, whereas the main buildings will have hardwood floors of maple or oak, and floorboards that are 2 inches wide.”
