Modernist architect Don Wrobleski is selling the “almost transparent” house in Bannockburn he designed for his mother in 1960 and has lived in for most of the 60 years since.
“I meant it to feel like you’re inside a pavilion, not exactly a house, with the outdoors all around,” said Wrobleski. “You can see through from side to side. It’s almost transparent.” From some rooms, the view outside is of the lawn, ornamental garden and pond on the 1.75-acre property. In other rooms, including bathrooms, it’s of the walled courtyards.
Wrobleski is asking $575,000 for the three-bedroom, roughly 2,100-square-foot house on Stirling Road. The price was set low with the expectation that the buyer will spend about another $75,000 on a new roof, said Lou Zucaro, the Baird & Warner agent who will represent the house when it comes on the market later in October.
In 1959, Wrobleski was 29 and a few years out of the architecture program at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he studied under Alfred Caldwell, A. James Speyer and others working in the style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. His dentist father had died, and his mother wanted to move from their Portage Park house to a suburban setting.
Wrobleski said they settled on Bannockburn because the lot was inexpensive at just $8,500. He designed a house in the Miesian tradition, but with a wood structure instead of steel because it was less expensive and conveyed the hominess he remembered from the family’s lakeside summer cottage. Not long after the house was complete, Wrobleski moved in with his mother, Helen, who died in the 1980s.
The living room is set between parallel walls of glass, creating the see-through impression Wrobleski wanted. A similar effect is in other rooms such as, at one end of the house, the side porch with glass or screens on three sides. On the other end of the home is the main bedroom, which is on two levels with the lower one a sleeping space with glass on two sides and open to the sitting-room area on the third. (Wrobleski now uses the sitting area of the main bedroom as his office.)
The openness to nature “has contributed to my lifestyle,” said Wrobleski, who’s nearing 90 years old but is still active. “When you live shut in, it affects you.”
Despite its transparent nature, the house has privacy. A tall hedge obscures it from the street, and, in the back, the yard edges on a forested area. The only reason to use curtains, Wrobleski said, is that looking out into the darkness at night can be unsettling.
The kitchen is all original, with elm cabinets, a limestone countertop on the high breakfast bar, a window wall between the front and rear workspaces, and a cantilevered desktop that appears to float next to a wall. It opens to a dining room that has glass on three sides. In the main living areas, the floors are green Vermont slate or a Chippendale-patterned wood, and chunky Wisconsin fieldstone forms some interior walls.
Wrobleski worked for the Chicago architecture firms Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Hausner & Macsai, where he contributed to the modernist styling of the 45-story Malibu East condo tower on Sheridan Road in Edgewater. He later specialized in remodeling homes and libraries, including nearby Deerfield’s.
The Stirling Road house was featured in Better Homes and Gardens 1968 Home Building Ideas and is one of a few dozen homes in the new book “Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975,” where the authors praise the details of Wrobleski’s design as “exquisite,” “clever” and “economical.”
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