Downers Grove house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright student for sale

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.

A house in Downers Grove has changed owners just once in its seven decades, which is a lot less often than the house itself has changed and grown.

It started out in 1952 as a small single-story postwar ranch house whose architect designed a fireplace wall, built-ins and other finishes in a style that evoked the style of his teacher, Frank Lloyd Wright. Over time, the house grew both up, to add a second-floor primary bedroom suite, and out, with additions that include a garden room whose three sides of glass fill it with the sight of the carefully nurtured landscape of native trees, a pond and a waterfall.

One thing that hasn’t changed is “the fantastic light,” says Pam Wolfe, who has owned the house on Hillcrest Road with her husband, Bruce Wolfe, since 1979.

When they were house hunting 44 years ago and came inside this one, “the first thing that struck us was the light.” The architect, G.E. Steckmesser, designed it with “big windows in every room and with a high plaster ceiling so there’s light everywhere,” she says.

When making additions, the Wolfes have tried to extend the spirit of the original design with similar wood trim and openness, even replicating a chevron-shaped set of windows.

Both retired — Pam Wolfe from teaching high school science and Bruce Wolfe from a corporate treasurer post — the two are moving to Urbana to be near one of their daughters and her family. They’re putting the house, a 3,100-square-foot four-bedroom on about two-thirds of an acre, on the market today. The price is $850,000. The listing agents are Elaine Pagels and Brita Pagels of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Chicago.

The built-in birch sideboard is an interesting bit of the architect’s original design. It gives a nod to the formality of a traditional formal dining room, although the space is really just one end of the open main room.

The other end is the living room, seen in the photo at the top of this story, and also delineated by its finishes, a brick fireplace wall and birch cabinetry.

The architect designed this at a transitional time. He had studied at Wright’s Wisconsin studio, Taliesin, in 1930, but two decades and a World War had passed. For this Downers Grove house, he designed something that was modern but held onto some of the elements of Wright’s Prairie style.

To the right of the dining room is a media room that was originally the covered back porch. The first owners enclosed it, and the Wolfes later redid it with banded wood trim and beams that echo Steckmesser’s original interiors.

Typical of midcentury designs, the house shows little of its lightness on the front. It’s the north side, with little sun exposure, so it has few windows.

“When you look at it from the street, it’s a subtle house,” Pam Wolfe says.

The second-story addition, containing a primary bedroom suite, is at the left in the photo.

The south-facing back of the house is where most of the windows are. It’s useful for capturing the low sun’s light and warmth in winter.

Near the middle of the photo, a peaked roof has a chevron-shaped row of clerestory windows. It’s one of three. Curiously, Steckmesser partly hid one of them, putting it on an attic space.

Two additions are visible in this photo: at left is the glass-sided garden room, and at right is the second-story primary suite. The room with the chevron windows was originally a covered porch.

The Wolfes added this glass-wrapped garden room, with wood ceiling beams and a chevron window to continue Steckmesser’s style, and skylights overhead for even more interior light.

Steckmesser isn't a well-known name in architecture, but old newspaper articles report that he studied under Wright in the early 1930s and later designed both a library and an elementary school in Downers Grove, neither of which is still standing, and at least one other house in Downers Grove, his own. It was used as an example of modern energy-conscious architecture in a book published in Australia, according to a 1945 Chicago Tribune article. There's also a house he designed in St. Charles.

The old back porch, whose original owners enclosed it to make a TV room, has another of the chevron windows. The herringbone-patterned floor picks up on the V shape.

This room is separated from the dining room by a glass panel where there used to be an exterior window, more of the concept of delineating rooms without completely separating them.

When the Wolfes redid the kitchen, they used light oak cabinetry to stay in tune with the original birch built-ins in other rooms.

The Wolfes turned the house’s attic into their library and weaving room, as well as the route to the primary suite they added atop the garage.

There’s half a chevron here. The other half is in a storage room, the remainder of the old attic. It’s not clear why Steckmesser put this nice architectural feature on the wall of the attic.

“But it gives us a lot of light now,” Pam Wolfe says.

Added in the 1990s, the primary bedroom re-creates several of Steckmesser’s original features, including the pitched ceiling, the wood banding and large windows.

The windows let in not only the sights but the sound of the garden below. “We can hear the waterfall outside from our bed,” Pam Wolfe says.

The waterfall is part of a pretty pond that the Wolfes built in the yard. Koi live in the pond, surviving through winter because the movement of the water and a supplemental heater in winter keep the pond from freezing over.

The large yard was once choked with invasive buckthorn trees and honeysuckle, Pam Wolfe says, but over the years they’ve been eradicated and replaced with dozens of species of woody plants, including oak, maple and dogwood trees and viburnum shrubs.

Pam Wolfe designed this bluestone and brick patio in the spirit of the council rings that the great early 20th-century Chicago landscape architect Jens Jensen popularized.

While the Wolfes’ house and garden have the feeling of a place in the wooded countryside, it’s actually across the street from a school and a short walk to Downers Grove’s downtown section and Metra station, and all the amenities of the near western suburbs are nearby.

The combination of living in a house infused with daylight amid mature trees but also being able to hop on a 30-minute express train to Union Station is “a treasure,” Pam Wolfe says.

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.

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