Jan Parr - Chicago Spaces: Inspiring Interiors from the Editors of Chicago Home + Garden Magazine

CHICAGO SPACES

Copyright 2011 Chicago Home + Garden, a division of Eagle New Media

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

Creative Direction: Megan Duffy Rostan

Design: Megan Duffy Rostan, Adam Moroschan

Copywriting: Gina Bazer

Typeset in Kings Caslon Typo and Aktiv Grotesk

Endpapers: Dufy Leaf wallpaper by Osborne & Little

First ebook edition 2012

ISBN-13 978-1-57284-684-5

First print edition 2011

First Edition

Surrey Books is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. For more information, go to agatepublishing.com.

INSPIRING INTERIORS

BY JAN PARR AND THE EDITORS OF
CHICAGO HOME + GARDEN MAGAZINE

A quiet corner in the bedroom of a Lincoln Park home

I GREW UP IN THE MIDWEST and learned early on that weekends bring with them a full roster of garage sales, flea markets, and auctions. At the age of ten, I would scan the classifieds, happily mapping out a plan of attack for me to navigate on my bike. As an adult, I could easily spend each Saturday deploying those same tactics, hitting every estate sale in a 50-mile radius.

Point is, you cant grow up around here without noticing one very important thing: The Midwest is the ultimate source for all things vintage, antique, and wonderful. Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin are gold mines when it comes to one-of-a-kind finds at you-cant-be-for-real prices. Those of us lucky enough to call Chicago home sit on the doorstep to it all.

I started my design business in Chicago in 1995. People from both coasts scoffed, wondering how Id ever manage to fill a clients home using the Midwest as my sourcing stomping ground. At first, I defended our great states, but then it occurred to me: Maybe it was to our benefit that only we knew just how good places such as the Chicago Antique Market, Pavilion, and Leslie Hindman Auctioneers really are. Maybe other people didnt need to know the great price you could get on a 1960s Italian leather sofa in Saugatuck, Michigan. The more for us, then!

I guess, though, you cant keep a good thing quiet for long. Today, the word is definitely out, in part because the staff of Chicago Home + Garden helped spread it. The Midwest does indeed have style, loads of it to be exact, and this book, full of the amazing interiors that live in this city (including, Im proud to say, one I called home for eight years and another one that my firm designed), is proof of that.

And while I cant claim my ten-year-old self started any style revolutions in the Midwestespecially considering I spent most of my money at Dairy Queen on my way home from the salesI can say Im proud to have witnessed our well-designed evolution.

Live well,

NATE BERKUS

CHICAGOS REPUTATION for world-class architecture is well documented. Mention Chicago to people who are interested in design, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright pop into their heads. But while we are rightfully proud of those two giants, the idea that Mies and Wright alone define our design aesthetic is as outdated as the image of Chicago being full of Tommy guntoting gangsters. Prairie-style houses around here are actual homes, not museums; some of us (gasp!) have furniture that is not Mission-style. An apartment in a glassy high-rise may include a Biedermeier in addition to a Le Corbusier.

The pages that follow put to rest once and for all the notion that Chicagos design sensibility is predictably conservative and safe. Our interiors are alive, vibrant, and current, mixing styles and periods and willing to surprise.

Architecture certainly informs design choices. But we are not slaves to tradition. A favorite trick of our architects is to leave the front of a wood-frame shotgun house (so prevalent on the North Side) intact so that it blends in with its neighbors, then blow out the back with a glass-walled kitchen/family-room with a deck. Around here, we call it the architectural mullet: business up front, party out back.

Designers and homeowners, too, have the guts to do things their way. They might keep the original wood moldings and built-ins in Victorian homes but paint them white, black, or gray for a fresh take. Theyll put a huge architectural relic in an entryway or cover a wall with hundreds of vintage snapshots. Theyll install a baroque kitchen in a sleek, minimalist home or team Louis XVstyle acrylic chairs with a glamorous mirrored dining table in a more classic setting.

As daring as they may be, these spaces, for the most part, are practical, livable, and, above all, personal. Theyre creative rather than showypure Chicago, in other words. By turns sophisticated, quirky, cottagey, sleek, refined, elegant, and laid-back, Chicago design, weve concluded, is not definable; rather, it responds to the needs and wants of its residents, its architecture, and its moment in time.

We are proud to represent a broad range of styles in our magazine, Chicago Home + Garden, and in the pages of this book. In a way, Chicago Spaces is a retrospective of the magazine, which was born some ten years ago out of a desire to give local interior design, architecture, and outdoor spaces the attention they deserved. No one was devoting an entire publication to these subjects back then; in fact, our publisher wondered aloud whether we would run out of homes to include. As this book makes clear, we havent and we wont.

Featuring some of the best projects that have appeared in the magazines pages, Chicago Spaces tells a uniquely Chicago story about the way we livecapturing, documenting, and sharing the spirit of creativity in this town. Though the book includes the work of the areas top designers, we did not set out to make it a whos who; instead, we chose spaces we loved, interiors that spoke to us, whether put together by a nationally recognized professional or by a talented homeowner. We hope they provide inspiration for anyone, anywhere, who wants to love where he or she lives.

JAN PARR

Editor, Chicago Home + Garden

At the end of a hallway that separates public spaces from the family room and bedrooms, shelves for books and memorabilia were created.

W hen a woman and her husband purchased a graceful but tired prewar apartment after living in a string of traditionally decorated suburban houses, they hired a Chicago design/build firm, Hudson Home, to renovate it, expecting one more variation on a familiar theme. Instead, she says, they took us to a place we never thought wed go.