Parisian Starckness

 

by: chicago designslinger

 

 [Philip T. Starck House (1925) Mayo & Mayo, architects /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

 

At a glance, you might think this house sits on a street in a chic Parisian neighborhood, but instead we’re in a residential area on Chicago’s north side. Designed in 1925 by the father and son team of Ernest and Peter Mayo for Philip T. Starck, the house looks French,elegant and expensive.

 

  [Philip T. Starck House, 330 W. Wellington Avenue, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

 

Philip Starck’s father started a Chicago piano manufacturing company in 1891, and by the time Starck the son became president, the P.A. Starck Piano Company had made the family very rich. Starck paid another wealthy city scion, meat packing heir J. Ogden Armour, $69,500 for the property. Ironically the land had once been the water’s edge of Lake Michigan, but by the time Starck made his purchase decades of landfilling had pushed the shoreline 1/2 mile to the east.

 

  [Philip T. Starck House, National Register of Historic Places, Meekerville District, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Starck only lived in his $250,000, 16-room mansion for a brief ten years. He died in 1935 at the relatively young age of 54 and the family piano company, taken over by his son, survived until the late 1960s. Philip’s widow Mildred owned the home until 1951 when the house was purchased by the Ephpheta Center, a school for the deaf. The Beaux Arts jewel box is once again a single family manse, the residence of a wealthy Chicago financier.