From the street, it’s a restrained example of late Art Deco design, standing out because almost every other house on this block in Oak Park speaks of the 19th Century. From the rear, it’s 100 percent 21st Century.
On the front, the original diamond-design oak door has been carefully reproduced in mahogany with period-style hardware. In the rear, steel-framed Miesian glass walls soar two stories, creating vast, light-filled spaces that are sparked by walls painted bright primary colors and decor that modulates delicately from the 1940s to the 2000s. There is a literal bridge from one era to the other, linking the two structures and leading to the spectacular new second-story master suite.
“It’s terrific,” says neighbor Ron Jerit, who has lived across the alley for 23 years. The original house always seemed as if “it wasn’t finished,” he says. Now, with the dazzling contemporary addition he sees every day, it’s as if “the house has two faces” — each different and complete.
The 2,400-square-foot addition that nearly doubled the space of this house and joined the boxy rooms of the original structure to great spaces and vast sweeps of glass was designed by Daniel Mazeiro, an architect who runs a commercial construction firm, Development Solutions Inc., in Chicago. When he and his wife, Daniela Blanco, decided to leave their West Loop townhome three years ago, they settled on Oak Park, where friends lived, because of good schools for Miranda, two days away from turning 5, and Maximo, 6, and the village’s character: “What brought us to Oak Park was the people,” Mazeiro says.
But they weren’t turned on by the 19th and early 20th Century houses that dominate the real estate ads in a village that was mostly built up by the 1930s. Mazeiro knew he wanted to design a modern addition, and a Queen Anne didn’t seem like a good candidate.
Then, in July 2002, they spotted the oddball house. Hidden by overgrown yews, the sandy brick structure was made of scarcely adorned rectangles, unlike its big-porched and column-bedecked Victorian neighbors from the turn of the century. Or the pre-World War I Prairie-style homes with leaded glass and oak woodwork. This house clearly dated from the 1930s or 1940s.
“What I found appealing is that this house was clearly designed by an architect,” says Mazeiro. And he knew it would suit his own architectural plans.
In addition to showing his design chops, Mazeiro sought to provide larger rooms, space for the children to gambol, modern wiring and computer connections, a kitchen-and-family room combination, a sheltered master suite with plenty of closet space and a closer connection to the outdoors — all aims of today’s tract homes, though not often executed with so much style.
The original house, it turns out, was built in 1940, designed by Charles Kristen, the architect of more than 60 houses and several apartment buildings in Oak Park in the 1920s, according to Douglas Karre, urban planner for historic preservation for the village. Many are in the Elizabethan-to-Jacobean style that was popular in the period. But the Euclid Avenue house is geometric and streamlined, hinting, Mazeiro says, at the elegant Art Deco design of luxurious ocean liners, such as the Normandie, that had captured the world’s imagination in the depths of the Depression. “It also was the time of Le Corbusier, so there is a Modernist element,” he says.
Built for a doctor, the three-bedroom house had suffered stylistically over the decades. An undistinguished front porch canopy had been slapped on in the 1970s. Ratty shag carpeting covered oak floors. But the structure was sound.
Respecting the past
“We put in an offer two days after we we saw it, and we already had schematic drawings and a budget for our ideas,” says Mazeiro. Jorge Vahedzian, who was Mazeiro’s design instructor at the University of Buenos Aires and with whom he won a National Design Competition in Argentina in 1988, later consulted on the plans and visited during the construction. With a design set — a rectangle that nearly shadows the shape of the original house — the next step was to meet the village’s requirements. Since the house is in a historic district, Oak Park’s historic preservation commission was required to review the plans. The commission is mainly focused on “alterations that can be seen from the street,” said President Douglas Gilbert, an architect. Since this addition was designed to tuck behind the original house, there was no objection, though there was some back-and-forth over street-side details such as the shape of a new curving porch canopy and the design of the new low-emission double-paned windows.
The historic commission had “a little different idea about historic preservation than perhaps in Argentina,” from where he and Blanco emigrated in 1988, Mazeiro says. Here, the requirements were more strict.
The construction began in April 2003, and the Mazeiros moved in about a year ago, with some decor and much furniture still to come. But the house was ready to be a home.
A tour of the house’s interior reveals the way old plays against new. On the front porch, you could be arriving at a party wearing shoulder pads and nylons with seams. But in the foyer, already the 1940s have met 2005.
The room is flooded with light from sidelights of glass block — typical of 1940s architecture but, in the original design, buried in a closet and a bathroom. A wall painted in a primary blue swoops up the very contemporary walnut staircase, but a Deco-tinged, slightly shiplike sconce lights the stairway. The black slate on the floor and the walnut on the staircase are part of the palette of materials that are echoed all over the house.
Peaceful coexistence
A left turn takes you into the living room, largely unchanged architecturally from the 1940s, with clean-lined wood moldings that are reproductions of the originals. But the floor is now composed of 3/4 inch-wide bamboo planks that glow from the light streaming in from an original corner window. A black granite redo of a 1970s fireplace surround is still under construction. In the heart of this unaltered space stands Le Corbusier’s classic 1928 black leather LC2 sofa by Cassina, as well as Le Corbusier’s LC4 chaise longue.
But artwork speaks of the present: a blue nude by Catalan artist Agusti Puig, bought on a trip to Barcelona, and a bronze sculpture by Argentine artist Maria Victoria Vinagre.
The adjacent dining room, with a wall painted that same bright blue, bounces you across the divide into the new part of the house.
The exterior rear wall of the old house still stands. It forms one side of a light-filled atrium that serves as a transitional space, slicing across the house and leading you down three steps to a large great room/kitchen. The original, relatively skimpy window openings still dot that rear wall and are filled with glass to control sound.
But the windows in the new great room are far from skimpy, sweeping from the slate floor up 10 feet to the ceiling, pulling the back yard indoors. In keeping with Modernist ideas, structural materials are honestly exposed: deep gray-brown textured concrete block, the steel that frames the windows, a structural column that runs straight up through the addition. A contemporary round dining table by Antonio Citterio and Midcentury Modern bent plywood and metal chairs by Charles and Ray Eames help bridge the design distance from 1940 to the present. There’s another fireplace and a big-screen TV. Yellow-painted soffits bounce lighting into the room.
The kitchen runs along the addition’s mostly closed north wall (screening a large Victorian next door that is being rehabbed after being the neighborhood eyesore for years). A wall of walnut cabinets runs to the ceiling, broken up by a strip of windows that replaces the traditional backsplash and offers an unexpected peek at the outdoors. The refrigerator is part of one of the addition’s most distinctive features: A bright red column that runs up through both stories. It contains two bathrooms (one on each floor) as well as that appliance.
In the basement, an original family room is much the same as when the house was built, except for a light well, subtly fenced in with nearly invisible sheets of glass. From the front of the house, the light-gathering well is the only hint of the architectural leap at the rear.
Sophisticated and children-friendly
Upstairs, the gray-black-and-Mondrian color scheme carries throughout, except in glass mosaic-tiled bathrooms and one bedroom: Miranda’s. (“She wanted a pink bedroom,” says her father, “and she got it.” Bright rose pink.)
But, generally, the children’s rooms, in the original part of the house, have the same spare design aesthetic as the rest of the house. The absence of cutesy, childlike decor, Mazeiro says, will allow the rooms to carry them through adolescence and let the rooms harmonize with the rest of the house.
Still, the rooms are definitely children’s territory. In Maximo’s, a street-map area rug is for playing with toy cars. Cork lines one wall in each child’s room. Maximo’s is plastered to the point of collapse, with original artwork and a “Master and Commander” movie poster. Miranda’s holds just a few meticulously chosen pieces.
And despite a style that might seem austere, this is a children’s house. In the family room, brightly colored foam chairs cluster in front of the TV set. In the back yard, a wood-and-plastic play structure keeps Maximo swinging. Before Halloween, a skeleton appeared on the front lawn, courtesy of Maximo (a “Neo-Gothic funerary” look, joked his father). In the central playroom is space for children’s computers, right next to their father’s study, where he can keep a watchful eye.
But when the children are tucked in bed, it’s time for the grownups to escape across the bridge. Glass-walled and floored with ipe — a dense, strong, heavy wood from Brazil — the second-story bridge crosses the atrium to a corridor that passes a spectacular copper-tiled bathroom and two huge walk-in closets. The passageway offers a vista to the grand master bedroom that spans the rear of the house.
The east and south walls of this bedroom are floor-to-ceiling glass (with operable inserts to let in fresh air). They can be shrouded by drapes of the same deep, plush brown as is used downstairs. Or they can be left open to the treetops (and a view of a 1950s-era garage that awaits a redo). The bed and Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman offer places to relax and enjoy the view.
Outdoors, above those windows, a louvered cedar pergola filters light two stories above a deck also made of ipe. It’s a subtle nod to the Victorians of the neighborhood: It wraps around the east and south sides of the house, much like the columned porch of the Queen Anne across the street. On the south, a bridge leads over a river rock-lined rain garden to a door to the original living room.
Big house, big dreams
There still is much left to do: sweeping white curtains to hang from the pergola (postponed because “I’m broke,” says Mazeiro, though he declined to specify a cost for the house expansion and renovation). Also landscaping. The Mazeiros plan a front yard that is an interplay between native prairie plants, green lawn and light.
The bones already are there. The yard has been terraced with concrete retaining walls that echo the square lines of the house.
It’s a big house, even in this era of ever-larger houses. Why? Chicago’s climate, the Argentine-born Mazeiro replies.
The weather forces everyone to spend a great part of the year indoors and that “certainly makes it more appealing to have enough room to stretch your legs,” Mazeiro says. And inside this once sad, now spacious house, the bright colors and trio of fireplaces cheer the cold months away.
