Although our nation was founded on democratic principles that outlawed structured nobility, affluent and privileged Americans have always seemed to want nothing so much as to live like European royalty. Following World War I, during the greatest economic boom in U.S. history, many of the newly rich fulfilled these desires by commissioning grand residences built on scenic country acreages, effectively rendering themselves lords and ladies of their own manors.
In Chicago, architect David Adler was the foremost purveyor of this domestic fantasy. Although he won some plum commissions elsewhere, most of his career took place on Chicago’s North Shore, particularly in Lake Forest and Lake Bluff, where his name is still uttered with hushed reverence.
While Adler’s original clients may have harbored aristocratic delusions, current occupants of the houses they commissioned seem to have different, and usually less egomaniacal, senses of identification with their homes.
Contemporary owners of Adler houses include some familiar names: the CEO of a major food products company, a prominent philanthropic art collector and even a former pop star (all of whom turned down requests to be interviewed for this story), as well as a number of relatively less glamorous, lower-profile personages. Their diversity makes generalizations about them impossible to formulate. What every owner seems to share, however, is a realization that they live in houses that are much more than mere shelter.
More than 50 years after his death, interest in Adler is at something of an apex. “The Country Houses of David Adler,” written by Lake Forest College alumnus Stephen M. Salny and published in 2001, recently entered its third printing. “David Adler, Architect: The Elements of Style,” the first retrospective of his work, runs at The Art Institute until May 18, 2003, and is accompanied by a handsomely illustrated, scholarly catalog that is typical of what the museum’s Architecture Department is so adept at producing. And through Feb. 28, the David Adler Cultural Center in Libertyville is mounting “Picture Perfect,” a show of Adler’s postcard collection–from which he drew many of his design ideas–and other personal effects.
The flurry of Adler-focused activity should dispel any notion he was simply a “society architect.” “I don’t think David Adler ever woke up a single day in his life without the idea that he was going to be creating a work of art that day,” said Adler scholar Arthur H. Miller, Lake Forest College archivist and special collections librarian.
Although sumptuously finished and often gigantic, most Adler houses do not provide the type of space that you would expect those who can afford them today would require in a residence: multi-vehicle attached garages, indoor recreation areas, places for informal entertaining, state-of-the-art kitchens and baths. Yet unlike other houses of similar vintage, remarkably few of Adler’s have been razed or even remodeled in a way that violates their original designs.
“People have a real sense of loyalty and devotion to these homes,” said Michael Ebner, A.B. Dick professor of history at Lake Forest College. “They are highly conscious and proud of where they’re living.”
In 1945, Marguerite Walk and husband Maurice purchased an Adler house built in 1928 on the lake in Highland Park from its original owners, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Mandel. Living there was a transforming experience, at least from a design perspective.
Before moving to Highland Park, the Walks had lived in a quirky house in Lincoln Park that Mrs. Walk furnished in the modern style, primarily with items from Herman Miller Inc. But when they moved to the French Normandy-inspired villa on Lake Michigan, she couldn’t resist purchasing some of the antique furniture the Mandels had acquired with the help of Frances Elkins, Adler’s sister and the interior decorator for many of his projects.
“This just evolved,” she said. “Just as people who buy a Frank Lloyd Wright house become possessed by it, I became very interested in history, so we searched for just the right pieces to put there.” Period photos of the house show an eclectic mix of furnishings that matched the 18th Century-style interiors and others that were from the mid-20th Century, all of which work remarkably well together.
Mrs. Walk’s daughter Margot remembers growing up in the house in the 1950s with obvious pleasure. “It was a wonderful place for hide and seek, with basements and sub-basements, and closets within closets,” she said.
The Walk house is on the market now–listed at $8.5 million. Margot Walk expresses the regret you’d expect from an adult child whose parents are giving up their childhood home, but she is reconciled to its inevitability. “As with any work of art, you really don’t own it,” she said. “You are just its privileged caretakers for a while.”
Jane Weeden reports that after she and her family moved to Lake Forest in 1975, she became fascinated with Adler’s work. When the 1927 house Adler designed for Mr. and Mrs. William E. Clow came up for sale in 1982, her real estate agent suggested she see it, and although she said, “I needed it like a hole in the head,” she looked. When she did, “it was like falling in love,” she said. “I felt as if it had been built for me.”
After she and her husband, Morris, bought the house, she was pleased to discover previous owners had left it intact. “It was virgin,” she said. “Nobody had ever done anything bad to it, and I wanted to preserve as much as I could.” Like a number of other Adler owners, the Weedens adapted their lifestyle to the house rather than adapting the house to their needs, more or less disregarding the notions of formality the monumental spaces might have suggested: Jane Weeden says that the vast, imposing living room, which features a coved ceiling soaring to 25 feet, was “always our favorite place just to hang out and eat peanuts.” With no live-in help (“Mrs. Clow had servants,” she says, “I have me”), the family was able to use the servant’s dining hall as their breakfast room, and servants’ bedrooms as home offices and guest rooms.
In a 25,000-square-foot building, there’s always something that needs attention. Jim and Carol Milgram–who live in the house in western Lake Forest designed for the family of advertising mogul and philanthropist Albert Lasker in 1927– know this firsthand, and Carol spends a great deal of her time managing various construction projects. “If you don’t have the patience and the interest in problem solving, this is not a place for you,” she said. Certainly it helps that Jim is good with his hands: he’s an orthopedic surgeon, and casually allows that he handles a substantial portion of the electrical work around the place by himself.
Like other Adler owners, the Milgrams have been creative about using the existing spaces in their home as is. While much of the house offers recreational venues for the Milgrams and their two teenage sons, they use quite a bit of it to store all the things they collect. In addition to the antique furniture, paintings and objects they inherited from Jim Milgram’s parents, they have their own collections of books, Flow Blue and Delft pottery and Civil War memorabilia.
Oddly, the collections are almost invisible set against the architecture of the house. The basketball court-sized living room features parquet de Versailles flooring, 18th Century pine millwork and reverse-painted glass accents. Twin sun porches sport floors of herringbone-glazed brick. Grand interior gestures such as these tend to blunt the impact of even the most striking decorative objects.
The Milgrams seem to like it that way. Jim explains that he’s a collector, and collectors want things in as original a condition as they can get. “The house has become like an extension of my collections,” he said.
If you’re a collector, you don’t necessarily have to live in an Adler-designed house to enjoy its pleasures. Taking a cue from Adler’s own methodology, one lucky individual authentically experiences the luxury of Adler’s design genius without actually living in one of his works.
During the heyday of the great American country house, rich Americans commonly imported large chunks of the grand European castles and chateaux they wanted their homes to emulate. Adler and Elkins were highly skilled in tracking down unique examples of paneling, antique hand-painted wallpapers, and exotic flooring for installation for their clients. So it is somehow fitting to find a room from one of Adler’s North Shore mansions in a townhouse on New York’s Lower East Side.
Once the current owners moved into the 1931 Lake Bluff house built for the Lester Armours, they decided that they didn’t like Mrs. Armour’s extraordinary bathroom, most notable because nearly every surface but its floor was covered, Versailles-like, in mirrored Venetian glass. According to New York interior decorator Miles Redd, when his friend James Shearron, an editor at House & Garden, found out about this, he tried–unsuccessfully–to convince the Art Institute to buy the room. Eventually it found its way to Salvage One, the architectural salvage dealer in Chicago. Redd, who had only seen photographs of the room, called to put in a bid but found that another party had put it on hold. “I was waiting in the wings, credit card in hand,” he said, and three months later, Salvage One called him to say it was his if he still wanted it.
Despite a minor discrepancy in ceiling heights, the room fit perfectly in the fourth-floor front of Redd’s 1826 townhouse, a fact he sees as providential. “Destiny was calling me,” he said. While some might perceive it as garish (sometimes he thinks of it as his “Las Vegas room”), its effect is singularly dazzling. “Even my jaded New York friends come in and say, ‘Oh, my stars!’ “
Like those who live in full-blown Adler-designed places, Redd uses his space innovatively. As he explains, his 3rd/4th floor duplex (his sister and her husband occupy the first two floors of the house) doesn’t have a dining room. In spite of this, when his family visited from Atlanta this December, he cooked Christmas Eve dinner, and served it in Mrs. Armour’s bathroom.
Not your ordinary holiday tableaux, certainly. But it’s not so difficult to imagine some eccentric aristocrats seated around the table.
