“If we can’t find someone in 90 days,” Kogan told Crain’s today, “we’ll have to do the other thing, the demo.” He declined to comment further. Kogan is a veteran builder of high-end homes in the suburbs of the North Shore.
The Winnetka Monuments Commission cannot prohibit the demolition of the house. It could have imposed a 60-day hiatus, said David Schoon, director of community development, “but the developer has offered to put it back on the market for 90 days.”
In the list, published by Marina Britva of Coldwell Banker, the house is offered as is (undated interior photos below), but “the builder is open to working with your client’s ideas”. The cost of the renovation would be added to the purchase price, the listing says. Britva declined to comment for this story.
Highgate bought the house, which is just over four-tenths of an acre, for $ 1.35 million in December. The house was not publicly listed on the multiple listing service; it appears Kogan privately arranged to buy it from the previous owner, but Crain couldn’t confirm this.
Kogan’s request to the Monuments Commission was only for the approval of the demolition. He had not filed plans for a replacement home for the site, Schoon said. The area allowed for a new home would be around 5,800 square feet, Schoon said. According to Britva’s list, the existing house is 4,000 square feet.
Winnetkans and the Chicago-area Conservatives had opposed Kogan’s demand for demolition, based not only on Van Bergen’s status as a prolific contributor to the rich prairie style buildings of the Chicago area at the beginning of the 20th century, but because of its original owners, Eugene and Clara Rummler.
Eugene Rummler held several public positions at Winnetka and, in 1917, started the caucus style for choosing officials. In Chicago, as head of the Association of Commerce, he was instrumental in securing the first stop on what is now being built the Stevenson Highway. The Rummlers owned the house until the mid-1950s.
The front of the house is rough stone on the lower part and wood with a familiar straight line of the Prairie School on the upper part, with a deep overhanging roof. “It’s distinctive, with an arched doorway in stone that leads inside a vaulted stone fireplace,” said Lisa DiChiera, director of advocacy for Landmarks Illinois. “This is not a throwaway house.”
In his report to the Monuments Commission, paid for by Highgate, Jean Guarino of Guarino Historic Resources Documentation in Oak Park wrote that the house has “local and national architectural significance as an exemplary design” by Van Bergen, and that a much of its historical aspect is intact.
Yet Guarino also wrote that the house “does not reach the same level of design” as some of the more well-known houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, for whom Van Bergen worked before going on his own. “John Van Bergen cannot be considered an architect of national or international significance, as most of his work has taken place in the suburbs of Chicago. In their day, she writes, Van Bergen’s designs were sometimes seen as derived from the work of other architects.
Guarino told Crain’s that this part of his report was intended to stifle the rhetoric of a Winnetka commissioner who “said the house is internationally known. This is not the case. Guarino said she believes the house should be preserved if possible.
Britva’s listing only includes photos of the exterior of the house. Undated photos from a previous listing of the house – presumably from 2004, the last time the house was sold before Highgate bought it last year – show a stone fireplace and corner walls in stone in the living room, as well as prairie style woodwork. Crain could not determine the current state of the interior.