Developer Ross Gambril specializes in shopping malls and industrial parks–recent projects by his firm, Eon Properties, include a sprawling “lifestyle center” on 53 acres of Indiana farmland. But four years ago he and his son, Joe, began a very different project: restoring a 70-year-old home built as a display “house of the future” for the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. The Wieboldt-Rostone House was a showcase for a new brand of synthetic stone exterior. According to the sales brochure, Rostone–a blend of alkali, shale, and limestone–came in an array of “pleasing colors,” demonstrated that “beauty and permanence in a modern home need not be expensive,” and cut down on the possibility of fire and termite damage.
And indeed, curiosity seekers from Chicago took the train to Beverly Shores, where Bartlett greeted them at the depot. “He’d put you in a limousine and bring you out here and run people through these houses of tomorrow, like a sales pitch,” says Todd Zeiger, director of the northern regional office of the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana. “He really used these houses much like they were used at the fair–to entice people.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Seventy years later the five futuristic houses are still standing–five of the other six fair buildings were demolished years ago. “They’re period pieces, but at the same time they’re very livable houses,” says Tim Samuelson, cultural historian for the city of Chicago. “They have a timeless quality,” enduring as examples of what people in the 30s thought “modern” would become. True, one of the architects predicted that in the future every family would own an airplane, but they were prescient in other ways–for example, the House of Tomorrow used passive solar energy to cut heating bills.
In 1980 the National Park Service bought the homes, granting the tenants long-term leases but without making upkeep a condition. Zeiger says the houses continued to deteriorate because the tenants “had no incentives to do anything but Band-Aid fixes.” The porcelain-enameled Armco-Ferro House, the inspiration for the mass-produced Lustron homes that still dot the Chicago suburbs, suffered severe water damage, most of which could have been prevented if the tenants had just fixed the roof and gutters. “By the time we got to it it was rusting like a bad ’57 Chevy,” he says. “There were buckets of water coming in.” In 1997 Historic Landmarks added the five homes to its list of the ten most endangered landmarks in Indiana.
It’s taken him five years to find five people of the “right bent.” He fielded countless inquiries from people who’d heard about the houses from stories in the local and national news, and while many were willing to write big checks to fix up the houses, they also wanted to replace old windows, tear down walls, and build additions. “We were looking for people in sync with our philosophy of restoration,” Zeiger says. “They have to understand that going in, you can’t make alterations.”
Zeiger says Barnes was the ideal candidate for the House of Tomorrow because she’s an architect specializing in preserving historic homes in the Chicago area and she grew up in a home in Aurora designed by William and George Fred Keck, the House of Tomorrow’s architects. The Kecks were early practitioners of sustainable design: they built their homes in tune with the landscape, and in the 1950s they designed roofs that held rainwater to cool the house during the summer and egg-carton grids that reduced the amount of sun that fell on passive-solar houses on hot summer days.
Barnes plans to use the House of Tomorrow as a year-round weekend home for her family. “It’s not only extremely beautiful and eye pleasing, it’s really practical how it was thought out,” she says. “When you live in something of that caliber you really appreciate it.”
