Slowing her van on the curving street in this 60-year-old Wilmette subdivision, Carole Etienne challenges her traveling companion: Which, she asks, is the new house on the block?
The visitor, thinking this should be a snap, scans the street but is stumped. Everything seems to date from the 1930s or ’40s. Finally Etienne reveals that the newcomer is the massive stone Tudor dead ahead–even though, from a distance, it appears to have the same substance and aged character as its neighbors.
The tour continues and the same question is posed. Now, the clues to Etienne–designed and –built homes begin to become evident: Rugged stones randomly protrude from masonry chimneys, like a chimney on an old Normandy farmhouse. An oval, leaded Queen Anne Victorian window adorns a side wall like a great brooch on a grande dame’s throat. The mailbox and exterior lighting fixtures date to the 1920s and sometimes earlier, and there are flower boxes beneath every front window.
And what is soon to be seen, the interiors of these houses, also has been touched by Etienne’s magical aging process. By recycling architectural artifacts and using construction techniques rarely seen since the 1940s, Etienne has made the new look old, inside and out-seamlessly blending new construction with older, neighboring homes in suburbs like Glenview, Wilmette and Northfield.
“I try not to give a house the look of the ’80s and ’90s. No built-in obsolescence,” says Etienne, who did a lot of renovation work before switching from making old look new to making new look old in 1992. “I give it the look of a lot of history, a lot of character, a place where people have lived for a long time.”
Much of Etienne’s success at doing this stems from her gift for coming across antiques and architectural artifacts and then finding just the right home for them.
“You have to visualize what the whole house is going to look like, then search for the piece that will represent that era, that feeling, that design,” says Etienne, who recently built three houses in this mode on spec, with a partner, Tom Kendall, to show just what is possible. (One of the houses incorporates the two remaining walls of a knockdown. In what may be her tour de force, a 4,500-square-foot country Tudor, three new additions wrap around remains of an older house.) “It’s got to be grand if it is a grand house. It also has to have a big chunk of history.”
In one of these homes, a pair of 102-inch-tall, 185-year-old doors, with etched-glass inserts, taken from a New Orleans house, now close off a master bedroom wing.
An antique Norwegian jelly cabinet became a wet bar in the library of one of the three additions to this house. She then copied the architecture of the backboard of the piece, took its decorative motif and had the carpenters match and use that motif in moldings on the 12-foot-tall library windows. The windows have been boxed out, to give them more dimension outside, and are held up by corbels copied from a New Mexican antique.
For the same house, she found an English antique, hand-carved walnut dresser she wanted as the focal point in a master bath. She turned it into a sink after locating the right bowl to set into its top.
The spectacular glass and rugged timber family room/kitchen jutting into the back yard was built from the yellow oak posts and beams from Al Capone’s old barn in Pistakee Lake, which Etienne got from a barn-razer. But because it wasn’t sufficient lumber, she had to find another barn, in Manitowoc, Wis., that matched the species of the wood and the color.
Much of her time is spent in enthusiastic scavenger hunts for materials and artifacts. She has amassed so many finds that two years ago, she opened a shop, the Etienne Designer Home Center in Evanston, where customers have purchased entire vignettes of antique furnishings she has composed.
The beauty of Etienne’s “new, old” houses is that owners get the charm and character of an older home and contemporary plumbing, state-of-the-art electronics, solar lighting and closets a la ’90s.
Not to mention details and special touches.
In one bathroom, the detailing extends to the fluting on the pedestal base of a toilet that matches the woodwork. Every piece of the 24-karat gold-plated hardware in the house has the same beadwork on it. A window seat in a bathroom has a heating duct under it to provide a warm place to sit while getting dressed. She is always looking for places to insert “little hideouts.”
“It’s a woman’s approach to building,” she says. “I always ask myself, `What can’t you find in a standard new house?’ “
Architect Joe Muran of Muran Nowak Architects Ltd. in Barrington has worked with Etienne on several projects.
“What she creates is a knockout,” he says.
Her ceiling heights soar and dip room to room and, conversely, she likes to vary the floor height “so you can view the room and then step down into it,” she says.
Her use of interior windows is equally unconventional.
A leaded-glass transom, for example, gets installed in a room so it can borrow light from an adjoining skylight. A skylight is put in over a closet to make it easier to pick out and coordinate a day’s wardrobe.
“She likes to introduce light in different places I would never think of putting in a window,” Muran says.
Her naturally refined eye was honed with study at the now-defunct Ray Vogue School of Design, but her success, like the designer herself, is driven by a passion for permanence.
It’s what sends her down a quarry in search of the right raw stone for a walkway.
It’s what makes her think about roughing up a new chimney. (“Find an old trowel that is broken up,” Etienne told John R. Koziol, the Mt. Prospect master mason who, under the designer’s direction, also tinted the mortar a buff color to further age stone chimneys and fireplaces. “Make it look like it was built a couple hundred years ago.”)
It’s what is behind this belief: “Many people will live in my house,” Etienne says, “but my name will always be on it.”
