A Thoughtfully Improved MCM Home Near Lake Michigan by J. Marion Gutnayer
87 Ravinoaks Ln – Highland Park
Several years ago, I had the pleasure of helping some clients sell a really neat MCM home in Highland Park at 87 Ravinoaks Ln. At the time, my clients had been in the house for quite some time, and it was mostly original save for some aesthetic updates in the ’70s. It was a beautiful home, and at just a few doors from Lake Michigan and backing to some of Highland Park’s ravines, it was in an excellent location, too.
The house was purchased by Gayle and Michael, who own an independent book store in downtown HIghland Park called Secret World Books. And while I wasn’t able to dig up who the architect was when I listed the house a few years back, Gayle made it her mission to do so, and with great success.
It turns out the home was designed by Chicago-area architect J. Marion Gutnayer. Gayle & Michael became true fans after purchasing the home, and as they began their journey to revitalize the property while keeping changes true to the home’s original architectural vision.
And given that Gayle is a writer, I thought I would break with tradition on this one and let Gayle tell you about the house and its architect in her own words. Many thanks to Gayle for sharing their story and their passion with you via Modern IL!
Take it away, Gayle…
I fell in love with 87 Ravinoaks on this very website in 2022, and hope now I can reach someone who will take it into its next chapter with just as much love.
I revisited Lou Zucaro’s article about the house here on Modern IL multiple times a day before we made an offer, drooling over photos of the hairpin metal stair railings and the original bathroom tile, yellow and gray downstairs, pink and black upstairs. I was obsessed with the seahorses etched into the shower glass, obsessed with the terrazzo floor, soaring windows, and exposed brick in the space that had been the original owner Jeanette Wright’s ceramics studio, obsessed with the mosaic of wild horses Wright had sculpted and inset into the stone wall of the double sided fireplace. I was obsessed with the fact that the house had seasonal lake views, and year-round views of the ravine. After we were lucky enough to purchase the home, I found even more things to love about the place—how magical it is to step through the back gate into that forested ravine and follow a path down to a quiet, nearly private, stretch of beach; how soothing to be able to hear the sound of the lake as we fell asleep. 87 Ravinoaks is a perfect mix of midcentury design and natural wonder.
In his article, Lou mentioned neither he, nor the sellers who’d lived in and loved the house for almost 40 years, had been able to track down the architect. I made it my mission to find the architect myself.
A flurry of sleuthing led me to discover the house had been designed by J. Marion Gutnayer. I hadn’t heard his name before, but upon further digging, I was stunned to realize he had designed all of my lifelong favorite houses along Sheridan Road from Evanston through Wilmette—one that looks like a Parthenon from the future, one that reminds me of a Brutalist toy box, one with a unique mix of brick and stone across from the Bahai Temple, one that evokes Star Trek and appears to have a two story front door. I had no idea they were all designed by the same person, each one artful and playful in its own unique way. Somehow I had stumbled into a house made by the architect who had shaped my personal aesthetic from a very young age.
It turns out Gutnayer’s fingerprints are all over Chicago. He renovated iconic spaces like the Second City and Auditorium theaters, designed both public housing projects and luxury Lake Shore Drive condos, and was the first architect in Chicago to use the technique of slip forming—originally used to build silos and grain elevators—to construct a high rise.
He was also a beloved architecture professor, the first at the Navy Pier campus of the University of Illinois, Chicago, where his students affectionally called him “The Goot.” The Chicago Tribune profiled him in 1952 for his unique approach to home building—“adhering to modern design, yet providing interesting patterns of contrast to relieve its severity.”
The Tribune article notes “(Gutnayer) makes use of texture, color, and light and shadow…His idea is that the building, whether a single family house or a tall apartment building, should be a thing of beauty and interest not only to the occupants but to the passersby…Gutnayer believes in more artistic detail than most modern architects, and likes to ‘play with’ materials, as any of several houses he has designed around Chicago show.”
Gutnayer especially liked to play with brick, often arranging different shapes and colors of it into stripes and other patterns. 87 Ravinoaks is made primarily of a sandy Roman brick, but also features two accent areas of split Roman brick in a variety of orangey shades—a field of it halfway up a back exterior wall, and a larger swath in the front that had been hidden behind a row of bushes. Once we removed that greenery, the true playfulness of Gutnayer’s materials could shine again. Gutnayer also loved to make unusual eaves for his houses—he called them “hats” and often constructed elaborate ones of redwood in a range of geometric designs. The “hats” on our house are jaunty–asymmetrical and slightly tilted, like cocked eyebrows, or flared wings.
“Creative architecture, with its spatial and physical grandeur, compared to the other visual arts, occupies a unique place in the hierarchy of man’s crafts,” wrote Gutnayer in a 1966 article for Inland Architect. “It is an ambitious artifact which overlaps the borderlines between aesthetics and utility, between an object of admiration and the one which gives us shelter.” He later declared “(Architecture) demands sincerity and vocational devotion, as well as an imaginative genius.”
87 Ravinoaks is a beautiful example of Gutnayer’s vocational devotion and imaginative genius, a gorgeous mix of aesthetics and utility, shelter and art.
J. Marion Gutnayer came from a family of arts and antiquities dealers in Warsaw. He was a draftsperson for Le Corbusier in Paris, and built movie theaters, apartment buildings, homes, and art studios in France and Poland. After most of his family was slaughtered during the Holocaust, he became a partisan Nazi fighter and went undercover to infiltrate Nazi art looters and try to recover his family’s and other families’ art, a quest he continued throughout his life.
After WWII, he served as Chief Architect tasked with rebuilding hospitals, factories, and other municipal structures in Lwow. He was friends with artists like Jacques Lipschitz and Robert Helman, and, following family tradition, became a passionate art collector, himself.
My husband did some sleuthing of his own and learned Gutnayer’s son Glenn is also an architect. We reached out to him to see if he would be interested in helping us with some renovations that would honor his dad’s vision and carry it forward, and were thrilled he loved the idea. He consulted from Colorado, where he now lives, and connected us with some of his local associates to do the onsite work, including Erik Johnson of Thacker Development Atelier.
We wanted to keep original glory of the house intact, and bring the small kitchen, which had been redone in the 1970s, up to the present while also honoring its origins. We tore down walls to open up the space, and Della Hansmann of Mid Mod Midwest helped us come up with a beautiful kitchen design, including slat walls that define the dining area but allow a sense of connection and flow of light with the kitchen. We added terrazzo flooring, and found some amazing vintage lighting and new old stock turquoise vintage pulls to accentuate the custom walnut cabinets made by Steve Janick. We chose green laminate countertops and love how they echo the leafy ravine through the large windows.
We brought green into the downstairs bathroom, as well. The original gray tile floor was scuffed and dingy, and we replaced it with a bright green honeycomb that complements the original yellow and gray tile. We also added a Kohler toilet in the reissued vintage Spring Green color and painted the vanity to jazz up the space even more. We brought more green outside, too, replacing the overgrown brush with a native pollinator garden. Each change we made to 87 Ravinoaks was undertaken with love and care and joy. The house is such a work of art in itself, and our renovations served to celebrate and amplify that art.
We’d hoped 87 Ravinoaks would be our forever home, but life had other plans for us. We’re so grateful this house has been part of our story, so grateful we could add our own touches to the story of this house. We hope whoever becomes the next caretaker of Gutnayer’s creation will honor and cherish it as much as we have.
87 Ravinoaks Ln is for sale once again. Click here for complete property info.
Click any image below…
