Families buy homes for many reasons. Eight years ago, a couple decided that a beautiful piece of property and the large rooms of an English country house, circa 1935, more than compensated for the homes dilapidated state. Slowly, they returned the house to its former elegance.
But two years ago, when the eldest of their three children hit her prime teen years, the family discovered they had one more project: to add a family room, since houses of that vintage were never built with such spaces. “Our living room was small and our then 16-year-old had no place to hang out with friends,” says the mother.
Because the owners wanted the addition to look as though it had always existed, Evanston architect Paul Janicki went to great efforts to meld new to old. He selected stucco for walls, graduated slate roof tiles, copper gutters, French doors and casement windows.
An even greater challenge was to fit together the different scales, since the addition was to be one story and the house was two. “There was a small precedent I borrowed from — a 1 1/2-story wing off the front that houses the garage,” Janicki said.
Janicki approached the new room as a series of wings. The main family room wing consists of a 20-by-40-foot room with 11-foot-high ceilings. A small windowed wing connects it to the rest of the house; a second small wing houses a bathroom with shower that doubles as a changing room for swimmers.
Because different generations use the family room, Janicki designed it with a main zone for watching movies on a drop-down screen, for card games and playing the piano, and a smaller step-down area with fireplace for cozy chats.
The entire expanse has an elegant patina achieved through the wifes choice of materials. She found random-width, 20-foot-long sycamore planks and foot-thick beams through a magazine ad. Even before the room was constructed, she found and stored a limestone mantel and columns for the fireplace and stained-glass windows.
The house is now complete with one exception. The wife left a stairwell to the basement intact so that she could show how horrible the house once looked. “Otherwise, nobody would believe me,” she says. The efforts by the architect and the owner have been recognized by others. The Lake Forest Preservation Foundation gave the room its renovation award last year.
———-
RESOURCES
Architect: Paul Janicki Architects, Evanston. Contractor: Dennis Kelbus Construction, Lemont.
Family room: Flooring and beams — Conklin’s Authentic Antique Barn Wood and Hand Hewn Beams, Susquehanna, Pa.; stained glass, light fixtures, mantel, columns and light fixtures — Salvage One; Ralph Lauren couches and all other furnishings — personal collection.
