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player ready...What is it like to live in a landmark house, one that was built by world-renowned architect David Adler for his mother?
For Janet and Tom Conomy, owners of the Mrs. Isaac D. Adler House since 1984, it’s simply home. Now they hope to sell the country estate and move to a Chicago condo. The house, with its coach house and garden, is listed for $1.325 million.
“It’s wonderful to live in. Every room has something different,” Janet Conomy said from the well-appointed yet cozy breakfast room. “This is what I would miss the most,” she said of the space she calls her favorite room.
“It was a great little house to raise two boys,” she continued. “Our boys were 8 and 10 when we moved here and they loved it. They loved the yard and cutting the grass with a riding mower.”
The five-bedroom house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has been written up in many books and was featured in a 2002 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. It will also be included in the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art’s tour, “David Adler, Howard Van Doren Shaw & Their Contemporaries: Classicism on Chicago’s North Shore” from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2.
“Structurally, we’ve changed nothing,” Janet Conomy said, noting they did add central air conditioning and ripped up pink carpeting to expose the 1930s Zenitherm (an imitation stone). The roof has been replaced a few times; the plumbing and the insulation were updated.
Original pieces like a raised bathtub in an upstairs bathroom and compact sink in a downstairs bathroom remain; more modern fixtures complement them.
Tom Conomy opened a 2-inch deep closet in the second-floor hallway. “He built this closet only because there was a door on the other side of the hallway. It had to match,” he said of David Adler’s original plans, which called for a large master bedroom. But rather than remove a door, which would have ruined the symmetry, the second door was added, according to the National Register of Historic Places. Two guest bedrooms have identical sinks in the same positions.
In the bathroom, the view from the oval in the window matches the oval of green grass in the circular driveway. “You don’t see that in homes today,” Tom Conomy said, gesturing out the window at the door in the wall that separates the house from the outside stairs to the garage. That door looks out onto the front door of the house, as is found in a symmetrical colonial revival house, with the front door typically in the center of the house.
“It gives you an appreciation of symmetry and balance,” he said. “It’s been a real joy living here and you pinpoint the balance that you see in everything. When we purchased the home, we didn’t know the history. It was a well-kept secret locally, even though Adler is so well-known around the world.”
After his mother’s death in 1939, David Adler kept the house, which was rented out after his death in 1949. His sister, Frances Elkins, gave the house to the village of Libertyville for a cultural and recreational center in 1953. The house was sold in 1954 by the David Adler Memorial Park Association; the Conomys are the third owners since the Adlers, according to the National Register of Historic Places.
Standing in the three-car garage, Tom Conomy reminisced, “We’ve had homecoming floats built in this garage. My sons were in sports and we’ve had 60 kids here in the backyard.”
This is the second time the Conomys have listed the house. “We’ve been here a long time and done a lot of things,” Janet Conomy said of the idea of moving. “A lot of mixed emotions. It’s bittersweet.”
Tom Conomy, standing in Janet’s office on the main floor, with sunlight streaming in from all four sides, said, “I love the natural light. I still walk in after all these years and say, ‘Wow. …'”
Shonda Talerico Dudlicek is a freelance writer.
Mrs. Isaac D. Adler House
Building size: 3,300 square feet. Three stories, five bedrooms, two bathrooms and two half-baths.
What’s in a name? Country estate named for architect David Adler’s mother, Therese Hyman Adler, who lived there until her death in 1939.
Building age: Built in 1918. Renovations and additions made by David Adler from 1930 to 1934.
Original use: Small country house with a garage/barn, poultry house and pump house
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Current use: Country estate/private residence with a garage/coach house, pump house — with well water used for the garden — and matching tool/storage shed.
Did you know? Two horse stalls with a trough still exist behind the garage that was added in 1974 by a previous owner, underneath the coach house.