Sun shining through the floor-to-ceiling living room windows and the steady stream of visitors coming through the front door of 2771 Crawford Ave., Evanston, on Aug. 28 made it warm, occasionally uncomfortably so.
No one touring Chris Enck’s restored John Van Bergen house seemed to mind, though – the house was too interesting to let a little heat bother them.
Many who visited knew the story of how Enck, a Winnetka resident who is also a restoration architect and fan of Prairie School luminary John S. Van Bergen, rescued the modest Van Bergen-designed two-story frame and stucco building from demolition in 2014.
Enck’s audacious plan – to cut the 1,588-square-foot house into three sections, then put it back together in a new home – garnered lots of attention in October 2014 and March 2015, as the pieces moved in two agonizingly slow flatbed trailer treks from Wilmette to Evanston.
Now, more than a year after its Crawford Avenue arrival, Enck was showing the house off, whole and largely as it looked when it was built in 1928.
The open house was more than a real estate showing, since 2771 Crawford hadn’t yet been listed for sale; it was more than a chance for Enck to recoup some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars it took for him to move the house and make it livable, even welcoming, for a new family, he said.
“I wanted to show that people can care for homes like this, that what I did, other people can do,” he said.
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He made few changes to the house beyond modernizing the tiny kitchen, updating plumbing and wiring, pulling up carpet to show the original hardwood floors, and putting the house on a much deeper foundation.
“The goal was to try to keep these front rooms as unchanged as possible,” he said, gesturing to the cathedral height living room, and the study and dining room to each side of it.
The house still features small but light-filled bedrooms on the second floor, a second floor bathroom with its own tiny staircase, a balcony around the living room, and the broad, clean horizontal lines of Prairie School design.
Enck, looking happily dazed, stood in one corner during the tour and answered questions. Many of them had been about how he dissected and reconnected the building, he said, but people also talked to him about the house’s history and its Wilmette-to-Evanston journey.
Some visitors, like Highland Park resident Lisa Temkin, were fans of Van Bergen, who lived in Highland Park. Temkin, who owns a Van Bergen house, helped organize the city’s John Van Bergen month in 2012; on Sunday she helped Enck prepare for a reception later that day for other Van Bergen fans and home owners, to be held in the house after the general tour.
“Van Bergen’s style is very organic, with natural use of materials and the way his homes fit into the landscape,” she said. “To him, the hearth was the center of the home, which is why you won’t ever see a chimney on one side of his houses – the hearth is always in the center.
“You didn’t have to be rich to own a Van Bergen. He designed beautiful, small homes,” she said. Van Bergen’s fans are extremely dedicated, she said: “It’s sort of like being a junkie.”
Other Sunday visitors had personal ties to the house. Linda McGuire of Wilmette remembered visiting previous owners as a young girl, but recalled that “it was much darker” in its original tree-shaded Isabella Street location.
Wilmette resident Charlotte Adelman also remembered visiting after her late sister and brother-in-law Lois and Art Solomon bought the house in 1986.
“I’ve always been impressed with how the light flows in, and the presence of this front room,” she said. Adelman said she was also happy that Enck had seeded the front lawn with native wild flowers, “which is very much in the nature of this house.”
Adelman’s niece Elizabeth Hubbard – who was a college student when her parents, the Solomons, bought the house – visited, too. She said Monday she’d grown up a block from the house in Wilmette, babysat for its then-owners as a teen, and later watched her parents jump at the chance to own what they called their dream house when it went on sale. After they moved in, she read books in the balcony, and years later watched her own children put on plays for their grandparents in that same balcony.
“When my mom died, I’m sure she hoped someone would buy it,” Hubbard said. “It was sad when we learned that a developer had bought the property.”
In 2014 and 2015, she watched the house move down Green Bay Road to its current location – and now, she said, she lives within a stone’s throw of it.
“It’s following me around,” Hubbard joked, before saying she was surprised at how many people were interested in the house.
“It was great to visit,” she said. “I expected to be sad walking through it, and instead I was really happy.”
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy