Wednesday, Apr. 13, 2005

 

Bridging design eras

Art Deco facade masks a thoroughly modern addition

By BETH BOTTS
Chicago Tribune

From the street, it’s a restrained example of Art Deco style, standing out because almost every other house on this block in Oak Park, Ill., 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, Miesian steel-framed 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 quite finished,” he said. Now, with the dazzling contemporary addition he sees every day, it’s as if “the house has two faces” — each different and complete.

The addition that nearly doubled the space of this house and joined the boxy rooms of the original house 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 because of good schools for Miranda, 5, and Maximo, 6, and the village’s character.

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. 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, 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.

Respecting the past

“We put in an offer two days after 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 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.

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.

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.

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.