When Trixie Kirincich, 63, toured her current Naperville home about eight years ago, she was taken by the house’s unique design features, including the flat roof and eaves that extend three or four feet out over its windows.
“I’m an interior designer so I saw the vision,” she said. “I immediately saw the unique design elements of the house but it needed a lot of work. I remember thinking, ‘This just isn’t going to happen,’ but a week later, we left the open house and my husband’s like, ‘I just can’t stop thinking about that house.’”
Now, she and husband Mark live in one of the remaining Naperville homes designed by famed mid-century modern architect and builder Don Tosi.
Their house is one of dozens included in a survey of Naperville Tosi homes conducted by Chicago-based firm Preservation Futures Inc. in collaboration with local nonprofit Naperville Preservation Inc., which recently published those findings in a new book, “Don Tosi’s Naperville: A 2025 Architectural Survey.”
“It’s a documentation of a notable builder who had some very special designs,” Naperville Preservation President Bill Simon said. “He built a lot of homes during Naperville’s growth, but now we see that they’re in areas (where) a lot of the homes are being torn down.”
Beyond his unique architectural designs, Tosi’s work helped characterize the spirit of the post-WWII era, a time of optimism for many young families.
“If you think about it, that’s the post-war baby boom era where there were so many families with children, people are doing a lot of activities in their backyards and (having) get-togethers,” Simon said. “So these homes that Tosi built, a lot of them have sliding glass doors that connect the indoor and outdoor space.”
It is the third architectural survey completed by the preservation group. Previous surveys of the East Highlands area in 2022 and River Haven Estates in 2023 were done to determine how many mid-century modern homes remain in those neighborhoods.
While the majority of the historic homes in River Haven Estates were mostly intact, more than half in the East Highlands had been torn down to make way for sizable upgrades. It’s possible Tosi houses fell victim to the wrecking ball.
Today, there are 172 Tosi homes left in Naperville, according to the survey results. Of that number, 63 are in the Cress Creek neighborhood, 23 in Hobson West and 22 in Maplebrook.
“We came up with a much bigger list than we thought,” Simon said. “We probably thought that we would have maybe 60 of them to begin with and we ended up with 172.”
Tosi’s architectural career started in the 1950s in Aurora, according to the former state publication Historic Illinois. At the age of 26, Tosi helped implement architect Bruce Goff’s vision for the Sam and Ruth Van Sickle Ford House, one of the most renowned homes in Aurora to this day.
That project was crucial in shaping Tosi’s future architectural style. He designed and built 16 houses in Aurora between 1951 and 1958, where his homes often included sharp angular features like irregularly shaped rooflines and triangular chimneys.
In 1956, Tosi took his design skills and affinity for angularity to the fast-growing Naperville, which saw its population increase from 7,000 residents in 1950 to 22,851 by 1970. Features of his Naperville homes included prow-shaped windows, overhanging eaves, orange front doors and cantilevered balconies with no exposed posts on the outside wall for support.
“If you look at a lot of the original balcony designs, they had a prow shape, so they would be angled outwards … and those were definitely easy to spot,” Simon said, although some had replaced balconies because they were difficult to maintain.
The survey was completed last year, with Naperville Preservation doing much of the identification and fact-checking.
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“What we found were that (the Tosi homes) tended to be clustered along certain streets or certain parts of subdivisions that were built in the ’60s and later into the ’70s,” Simon said. “So when we found those characteristics, we were able to note which ones they were and then have our intern validate those.”
The public also played a role in putting together this survey, he said. Last summer Naperville Preservation asked the public to participate in a “Spot the Tosi” contest, resulting in 16 houses previously unknown to the group. Additional homes were identified by scouring a Naperville Township database of builders.
Once the list was complete, Preservation Futures cataloged the houses and visited those where homeowners were willing to let them inside.
With the survey results now published, Simon said he hopes more people will appreciate Tosi’s contributions to Naperville and feel motivated to preserve his architectural style.
Copies of “Don Tosi’s Naperville: A 2025 Architectural Survey” can be purchased through Naperville Preservation, www.napervillepreservation.org. A book release party will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 13, at Nichols Library in downtown Naperville. Edward Keegan, a baiduhai architecture columnist, will speak on “Middle Squared: Mid-Century Modern in the Midwest” as part of the event. Admission is $10 for anyone who is not a member of Naperville Preservation Inc.