THIS MIDCENTURY HOME FOR SALE IN GLEN ELLYN HAS 94 WINDOWS!
By Dennis Rodkin for Crain’s Chicago Business
Photo credit: Lucrative Dynamics
At the hillside house in Glen Ellyn where Alan and Beth Lanning have lived for nearly four decades, "we have 94windows," Alan says, "and there's greenery outside every window. Living here, it's like you're living in nature." There's also a bit of nature literally indoors, a red oak tree growing up through the floor and out the roof of a screened porch, protected there since the house was built around it seven decades ago.
Built in 1952 on Midway Park, the house gets the sunny connection to its surroundings from its architects, a pair of modernists who would later put their imprint on houses, churches and even a dry cleaner's store.
But the Lannings get some of the credit as well, not only because they preserved the house's midcentury look long before it was back in style, but because they added two decks that extend indoor living to the outdoors and made a few other small changes that keep the connection to nature strong.
The Lannings, who moved to Glen Ellyn when Alan was a professor of psychology at the College of DuPage in the same town and raised two kids in the house, are now septuagenarians moving to an apartment nearby. They're putting the house, a four-bedroom, 2,100-square-footer on half an acre about a mile from Glen Ellyn's downtown core and its train station on the UP West line, up for sale. Listed with Kathy Quaid and Maureen Rooney of Quaid & Rooney, the house is priced at $985,000.
Set on a rise, the house has the long, low form that Frank Loyd Wright and many other modern architects across the country were working with in the years shortly after World War II. Here, architects Brooks Buderus and Gerald Siegwart set the lower floor back from the upper to make the upper floor appear to float on the hillside.
The architects were young — Buderus in his early 30s and Siegwart in his late 20s — when they built this house for A.I. Manning. Buderus would go on to design houses in Barrington and Winnetka with an "uncluttered" style, a Chicago Tribune reporter wrote in 1957. Buderus also designed modern churches in Glen Ellyn, Grayslake and Highland, Ind., among other places. Siegwart designed another house built around a tree, in Lake Forest, and, in1959, the now beloved Pride Cleaners in Chatham, which Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey has described as "an architectural creation from the Space Age." Earlier this month, Dwell magazine detailed the recent rehab of another of the architects' designs, built a year after the Lannings' home.
A long run of windows across the back of the house fills "every room with the view," Alan Lanning says. Toward the right is a projection that houses a glass-wrapped room on one side and a screen-wrapped porch on the other.
The tree that appears to be in the background behind a blue patio umbrella is closer than it appears. The architects designed the screened porch around the tree nearly 70 years ago, and it's still standing.
When the Lannings bought the house 38 years ago, the exterior wood, both front and back, had been painted a bland gray. Alan Lanning spent a couple of years stripping all the paint and refinishing the cedar to restore its original natural look.
The lower living room, also seen in the photo at the top of this story, is partially submerged into the hillside, with the upper floor cantilevered out beyond its window line.
The post and beam ceiling is original, but the beams had been painted black. Alan Lanning stripped those, too. He also installed the backlit stained glass panels depicting leaves and vines that run along the soffit. Designed by Beth Lanning and fabricated by a glass artist, they evoke the real-life plants outside the windows on the opposite side of the room.
The upper living room has floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides. Because the site slopes downward from the house, "we look over most of the neighbors from here," Alan Lanning says. The view wasn't so great when they moved in. Previous owners had let the lot fill up with volunteer trees, obscuring the view.
The fireplace hood was black metal, but the Lannings replaced it with copper for a lighter look that complements the stripped beams above.
Another view of the upper living room shows its glassiness, as well as the hallway along the bedroom wing. With windows along one side and beams overhead, it's more than a functional side-loading hallway — it's a space meticulously designed to echo prominent elements of the house.
The dining room retains the traditional enclosed feeling of such spaces, but with modernist twists, including a full wall of glass, a glass clerestory opening on the far wall, and a minimalist fireplace set into the righthand wall.
The Lannings gut-renovated the kitchen. They put in all new cabinets in wood, a nod to the setting, and soapstone countertops. Formerly, volunteer trees and overgrowth shrouded the windows, making the room feel dark. Now, washing dishes while facing a wall of glass "is a pleasure," Alan Lanning says.
In this picture of the screened porch, the red oak's trunk is seen on the right edge. Below this room is about 4 feet of trunk and above the room is the tree's canopy.
"I was worried about that tree when we moved in, but it's stayed healthy all these years," Alan Lanning says.
When the Lannings considered enclosing this space to make it a four-season room, arborists cautioned them that the tree might not survive, in part because they couldn't say what would happen long term if the outdoor parts were exposed to outdoor temperatures while the indoor section experienced controlled temperatures. Just in case, he says, "we decided to keep it a three-season porch."
The primary bedroom is one of four in the bedroom wing, all with half-walls of windows out over the verdant yard. The beams here are still black, painted by a former owner.
All 94 windows in the house have been replaced with modern heat-saving models.
In keeping with the home's original nature-infused style, the primary bath update used the same materials of the kitchen, wood and soapstone, as well as a glass shower box that picks up on the home's expanses of glass.
This deck, one of two that Alan Lanning built, steps down to the backyard, which is profuse with the couple's plantings. The other deck is around the corner, set on a low spot near the detached garage.
Alan did an enormous amount of work on the house himself in those early years and says now, when he's nearing 80, "I miss that man."
Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.
