People who live in a faceted glass cube of 5,500 square feet should have a rubber roof and plenty of their own stones–French limestone, Wisconsin Lannon stone, etc.
They should have motorized blinds and shades (to the tune of nearly $100,000) that turn the whole place opaque with the press of a button in about a minute flat.
They should have nothing but chic and/or state-of-the-art stuff–Italian furniture; 42-inch plasma TV set; Porsche-designed toaster; soaking tub made from a composite that mixes marble dust with resin so that it feels more like stone than a synthetic material; a remote that controls Planet Home (audio, video, lights, heat, air conditioning, blinds/shades, security) in a couple of clicks.
But perhaps most of all, these people should have a clear vision of what they’re doing here in the 21st Century, here on a conservative North Shore street, land of 1-acre lots, sprawling ranches and distinguished Tudors. (More on what the neighbors think later.)
“It had to do with bringing nature in and also expressing what’s possible in housing,” says Thomas Roszak, 36, designer of this high-tech, crystalline fantasy. Visions of it have been swimming in his head since he was a boy. He and his wife of seven years, Justyna, 35, moved in in late November. Their previous home, a condo, was about a fourth the size of this place.
“People love to have state-of-the-art automobiles,” says Roszak, an architect and developer of luxury condominium buildings by profession. “Their cell phones–literally, every year they change them because they want the latest model. Every six months, your computer is almost obsolete. But when it comes to homes, people want things that look like Grandma’s house. . . . I just don’t understand that.”
With a click of the remote control, the Venetian blinds march the 21 feet down to ground level in the living room, humming as they descend from the soaring, yellow, steel-beamed ceiling to the Brazilian cherry wood floor. It is bitter cold outside, but a potent winter sun has invaded. And in a house whose skin is 275 panes of glass, that is a call for action. Justyna clicks the remote again, taming the manmade heat. And now everyone settles into the upholstery for a talk about Post-Grandma housing.
Tech and spiritual connections
“I really wanted to express technology in terms of what was available, all the different systems–the structural systems, the electrical systems, the heating systems. I wanted everything to be as technologically advanced as it could be,” says the architect, who got his Modernist ways at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
“But then I wanted to present it in a very pleasing way in terms of aesthetics and showing that this machine could be very beautiful,” says the man who also got married. And Justyna, an aesthetician (she gives facials) and film student at Columbia College, is the point person on beauty.
“What’s interesting with this house is that you can play with the light in so many different ways,” she says. “The other day we were sitting in the [suspended] library upstairs and it was snowing and it was just so beautiful. We turned off some of the lights. It was like a fairy tale.”
Justyna is interested in the mind-body-spirit connection.
She pushed for a dedicated meditation room where they do yoga. It claims one of the five bedrooms upstairs and is outfitted with mostly empty space.
She also pushed for a kitchen and dining room with southern or eastern exposures. “It’s nice to have a breakfast when there’s light coming in. You just feel so revived,” says the devotee of feng shui. She wanted the same glories for the master bedroom. “We wake up with the sun. . . . It’s not against nature.”
Glass, aluminum, steel, concrete–the house’s list of building materials does not read like a field guide to natural living.
But what Roszak envisioned was a glass cube filled with open space. Let no clunky structure break the flow. That eliminated the prospect of building this house with lumber. And so, he deferred to industrial materials and building techniques and unleashed something earthy and raw in them.
Concrete columns rise from the ground, shouldering their companion concrete beams. Together they form three sets of portals that are the main structure of the house. The concrete then bears a skeleton of steel beams, painted a brilliant yellow-orange to cast a glow from above. And holding the steel stable is a massive concrete shear wall that thunders silently through the house’s core. All of these bones are exposed.
“Essentially, things that you see are very cold and industrial, but things that you actually touch, that you walk on, are warm,” explains Roszak, noting the warm cherry wood floors and the limestone tiles that run along the perimeter of the house. The limestone is heated radiantly from underneath.
Through veils and layers
A trip to Japan two years ago proved a sensory-altering experience for the couple. They got turned on not only by the architecture but also by the metaphysical thinking behind it.
The way Roszak glided the steel beams over the concrete ones instead of nesting them together is a clear nod to Japanese form. So are the bands of horizontal windows that break up the verticality of the facade.
But on a more abstract level, Roszak used the shoji screen and the idea of a house revealing itself slowly through veils and layers as something of an overriding theme.
The Venetian blinds and linenlike shades (over the horizontal windows) are obvious veils.
Less tangible are the house’s veils of space.
Roszak planned a mini-sensory journey to the front door. Visitors follow the brick pavers up the driveway, cross a path of craggy Lannon stone and step atop a platform of the stone before reaching the harbor of the smooth teak wood porch. A glass canopy cantilevers above.
“You never just step into a Japanese house,” Roszak explains. “There’s always this procession, like a celebration of the entrance.”
Similarly, he played with the procession of the facade. Instead of creating a solid cube shape, Roszak faceted the house so that it juts in and out, creating positive and negative spaces. And that, in turn, creates opportunities for additional magic–for being inside the house and being able to see outside, and then back in again across the floor plan.
“It’s all about space,” says the socks-and-sandaled architect. “You have the space in front of you, the middle and then beyond.”
It comes as no surprise, then, that Justyna would talk about loving “the space” and wouldn’t think of mucking it up with wanton furniture or, worse, knickknacks.
Their stuff amounts to a sprinkling of understated Italian furniture, much of it in white leather. They do have a collection of books, neatly filed in the library upstairs. And Justyna does have a fancy for vases. But they are functional vessels scattered about the house and filled with twigs or flowers.
Home as stage
Color is equally guarded. The Roszaks use it to stoke warmth over and through the house (the yellow-beamed ceiling, the two bright red closet units flanking the entrance foyer).
Warmth is not something this house conjures up from the curb. But contrary to everything the eye wants to believe, it does not feel like an icebox.
It feels serene. The house seems pumped with oxygen. Ceilings soar but the rooms themselves (most of them 16-foot squares) are intimate. There are no walls to divide; the concrete columns merely suggest a passage. And then there are those powerful Venetian blinds, cutting the sunlight into beautiful slices that paint the floors, the furniture, all surfaces. And almost immediately, you forget you are on display.
Of course, the Roszaks don’t forget that.
During the day, it’s not so much a problem. The reflectivity of the glass makes it difficult for the neighbors to see inside.
But at night, the opposite view is true. The house turns into a lit stage set. And the neighbors can get an eyeful.
“You have to understand, with that button, it solves the problem,” says Justyna, referring to their smart-home system. It packages all of the house’s major operating systems (including the blinds and shades) into neat little remote control units and touch pads in every room. “You can close everything from our bedroom, from every room. The lights, shades, everything. So it’s easy.”
She goes on: “I didn’t want to be somewhere in the woods. . . . I wanted to be around people.”
Dances with neighbors
The people have had mixed reactions.
“It’s a nice house. I just don’t think it belongs on our road. But to each his own,” says one anonymous neighbor. “At first I was very upset about it, but now I’m over it.”
More taken with the house are the neighborhood kids. The Roszaks are encouraged by the many who have knocked on their front door for a tour. They find the house “so cool.”
There will be more children in the picture soon. Justyna is expecting twins in June.
For now, they’re planning the landscape that will be planted this spring. Wild grasses, perennials, wildflowers. Lots of robust white pine trees along the back and two sides of the house for privacy. And interspersed among them for color, a few Katsura trees, red maples and Eastern redbuds.
In the front, it will be more open with a few of the pines but moreso a screen of Whitespire birches.
“They express all these vertical mullions,” says Roszak of the birches. “There will be all these natural vertical elements against this very straight part of the house. It’s kind of like an interplay with nature.”
UNDERSTANDING THE MACHINE
Architect and owner Thomas Roszak built this house as a machine for living. Here are some of the mechanics:
The big news: 5,500 square feet. Five bedrooms, 4 1/2 baths. One-acre lot.
Brake with caution: Took two 18-wheel trucks to haul the 275 panes of double-insulated, Low-E glass (low emissivity; an invisible metallic coating blocks radiant heat from escaping while allowing the full spectrum of sunlight to come streaming in) to the construction site. The glass is in 40 custom sizes. And it’s set Mondrian-style into the aluminum mullions of the curtain wall. The largest panes are in the living room and measure 10 feet wide by 7 1/2 feet tall.
Please pass the Windex: The Roszaks hired a commercial window-washing firm that is scheduled to clean all those windows–both inside and out–four times a year at $900 a pop.
Blinds ambition: Motorized Levolux blinds and Nysan shades are operated by 75 motors that make the blinds go up and down and also control the pitch of the slats by 15-degree increments. The Roszaks are thinking of upgrading the system so that it is even more automatic. With the addition of sensors, the blinds would adjust themselves according to the sunlight.
Planet Home: To eliminate the need for a load of remote-control units or huge, unsightly control panels on the walls, the Roszaks got a Crestron central home automation system. All of the house’s major operating systems (audio, video, lights, heat, air-conditioning, security, blinds/shades) are bundled into a single system so that fingertip control is possible with remote-control units and unobtrusive touch pads on walls in every room.
Hyper-heat: Three systems are at work here. There is in-floor radiant heat. (Hot water runs through a network of pipes in the floor.) There are four rather non-traditional furnaces. (Their forced air gets hot by blowing over coils of hot water, not by gas fire, resulting in moister air.) And there is passive solar heat. (The house’s concrete structure acts as a thermal collector during the day, releasing heat as the house cools down.) The house can be heated adequately with the radiant system alone until the outside temperature drops below 40 degrees.
About January: Their gas bill in January was $450. The electric bill: $280.
Cool down: The four furnaces pump central air through the in-floor ducts. There are nine zones in the house.
Under the radar: The house is located in unincorporated suburbia. There were no appearance committees or architectural review boards to convince. The Cook County Building and Zoning Department was the overseer, and it is more concerned about technical specifications and meeting codes than whether a house is clad in wood or brick–or not.
Bottom line: Roszak would not divulge the cost to build this house. But figuring the Roszaks paid $750,000 for the lot (actually, a 3,200-square-foot ranch house, which they tore down) and nearly $100,000 for the blinds/shades, it’s way up there.
— Karen Klages
