On a corner of Ohio Street in Ukrainian Village, there’s a classic Chicago building, three stories of red brick with a stiff white turret jutting skyward. You see versions of it on countless streets in the city, but nowhere does it look quite as much like a building with a boner.
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Ornamentation is rare anywhere in the house. The kitchen has simple oak cabinets, with stainless steel appliances and steel countertops, chosen by Zola to keep the variety of surfaces to a minimum; only in the library are there any signs of clutter. The bathrooms are serene white-and gray-tiled retreats. The master bath’s sole flourish is a clever visual ruse: you know that the Sears Tower is many blocks to the southeast, but when you walk in, there it is framed in what appears to be a window facing west. It turns out to be a mirror. “I gave people something to think about when they are sitting there,” Zola says, indicating the toilet.
On the upper level of the house is a little bump-out, a projection from the brick structure that allows room for the stairs without stealing floor space from the bedrooms. It’s no more than four feet by eight feet, and it’s about eight feet tall–just the right size for a tree house. And that’s exactly how this little spot feels, with a bench where you can sit and look out over the treetops and the neighboring houses at an enormous section of the near west side.
After finishing college back in Zagreb, she enrolled at the Architectural Association in London. In the next decade she worked for several leading European architects and professors before opening a firm of her own in 1990 in London, where she met her husband, who’s originally from Australia. After they moved to Chicago she worked for DeStefano & Partners, then opened her own office a few years ago.
Glass and Bedolla really liked the house on Ohio. When they met with her they found they liked her approach as well. “We said we wanted a small, urban, efficient, perhaps even modern house, and all those words are to an architect like nectar to a hummingbird,” Glass says. But they didn’t want to spend much more than $500,000, a midrange figure in today’s market, Glass says. Zola was game for that challenge too. The couple wanted passive solar design, a way of shaping and positioning a structure to give it as much sun as possible in winter and as much shade in summer. They also wanted geothermal wells, which run water 100 to 150 feet below the ground to cool it for air-conditioning in summer and preheat it in winter to reduce the furnace’s workload. Zola hipped them to something else: insulated concrete walls–essentially sandwiches with concrete for the bread and thick insulation for the filling–hold heat well. These walls became an integral part of Zola’s design, which she dubbed Zero Energy house. She also made it mostly one room deep in order to allow for full penetration of the sun’s heat and light.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Paul L. Merideth.
