Strange Closets

Thanks to Chicago Home + Garden’s Domestica blogger Bradley Lincoln for introducing me to his friend Dave Albin, who has more living rooms than any guy I know. A contractor by trade, Dave meets with clients in the downstairs parlor, plays music in the adjacent bonus room, watches TV in the upstairs lounge area and [...]

When Martha Muholland and boyfriend Ben Chappell moved into their Wicker Park ‘duplex down’ apartment, she was excited about having a lower level to decorate. True to her formal southern roots, the Kentucky native decided to stage the first floor as a more formal receiving / guest area. The lower level serves as the couple’s [...]

Martha Muholland and Ben Chappell’s taxidermy-filled 1800 square foot Wicker Park apartment feels simultaneously rustic and refined, serious and playful. Incorporating both her Kentucky roots and her urban now, the stylist / designer / decorator mixes lucite, mid-century modern and antique pieces with one-of-a-kind finds such as the red leather upholstered chair, which sits under [...]

I’ve got several deadlines to meet this week, so please forgive this abbreviated Open House.  It’s a sequel of sorts, as I featured Nick and Rebekah’s Michigan farm house back when summer was still groggy but awakening from its winter slumber.

Interior Designer Hilary Bailes and her daughter Margo starred in one of the earliest Open House tours, so I was happy to be invited back recently.  

Change is in the air; that much cannot be denied.  It was especially apparent this week at Dr. Kevin’s Bucktown single family home.   After living in the three story contemporary house for nearly 20 years, the good doctor recently decided that it was time for a change, spurred in part by the end of [...]

They say that a man’s home is his castle, but for most it’s just a figure of speech. For Frank, the owner of a successful west side wire manufacturing company, it’s just a fact of life.

If there’s one thing I learned while spending time with Jim, who is well into his second decade of gutting and converting a Bucktown 2-flat into a single family home, it’s that he’s a very (very) patient man. And while the space is, as it stands, a fantastic interpretation of Japanese Modernism, it’s not quite [...]