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.

 

 

The Newman Triplets

by: chicago designslinger

[Gustav R. Newman Residence, 2430 N. Orchard Street, Chicago (1895) Chicago, John Van Osdel II, architect /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

When you look at these three houses sitting side-by-side on Orchard Street, there is something about them that looks very much the same yet different.

  [Charles Newman Residence, 2424 N. Orchard Street, Chicago (1895) Chicago, John Van Osdel II, architect /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

They were designed in 1895 by architect John Van Osdel II for the Newman brothers - Charles,   Gustav and John – proprietors of the Newman Brothers Piano Company, and built, all at the same time, on three adjoining lots. While Van Osdel matched the design of each exterior, he changed the kind of stone used to face each house front. Perhaps this was Van Osdel’s way to reflect the fact that while these three structures and their owners were related, the houses, like the brothers, had different personalities.

  [John Newman Residence, 2434 N. Orchard Street, Chicago (1895) Chicago, John Van Osdel II, architect /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

By 1910, Gustav and John were dead and Charles’s nephews, and his brother’s heirs, ousted him as president of the company. According to Mrs. Gustav, the nephews “feared that their uncle would close up the business and not do the right thing by the boys.” So although personal harmony between the houses of the Newman clan didn’t last that long, Van Osdel’s harmonious Chateauesque design have survived the test of time.