Frank Lloyd Wright’s Heller House Hits the Market Today – Chicago Magazine

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The home’s entrance is quite ceremonial, with the limestone pillars and plaques cutting into a rectangular frame. That frame picks up again in . . .
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. . . the receiving room off the foyer and . . .
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. . . the main fireplace of the living room.
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In the living room and throughout the first floor and most upper-floor rooms, the paint colors duplicate Wright’s original choices. The owners prior to these sellers restored them after decades of changes. In the living room, Novick says, Wright wanted to evoke “swirling autumn leaves.”
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The living room has a second inset nook, this one lined with windows.
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The dining room, too, has paired side nooks. It’s painted in the Cherokee red that Wright favored.
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Many interior doorknobs are emblazoned with a stylized H (for Heller).
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Two of the home’s finest components—the main stairs and the stained-glass windows that illuminate them—are difficult to capture in pictures because of their layered arrangement. The lower half of the stair rises behind the front balustrade in this photo, and then the stairs double back and cross behind the rear one. (See the next two photos.)
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The master bedroom’s inglenook was almost lost. Previous owners had walled over the fireplace and wood trim, so when later owners wanted a master bath, the boxy space seemed right for it. When they discovered the fireplace, “they did the right thing and went without a big master bath,” Novick says.
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The design of the stained-glass windows on the second floor suggests the columns on the exterior.
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The second floor has three more bedrooms; Novick and Goldstein used two of them as offices. Because the original plans to expand the second floor, drawn by Wright, are intact, a buyer might get support from landmarks officials to build it out.
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The main room on the third floor, now used as the living room in an apartment for the couple’s oldest child, may originally have been an open-air porch. While entertaining on the porch, the Hellers might have walked their guests over to . . .
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. . . this view of the neighborhood from the columned portico . . .
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. . . and close-up views of the maidens.
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More maidens
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When the Hellers bought the lot north of their home, they brought Wright back to make a few additions, including the small glass rear porch and an elevator, housed in the slender vertical section.
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With her husband already relocated and their three children grown, Novick acknowledges that it’s time to leave the house, although it’s a tough decision. “If you had a Van Gogh painting, would you sell it because it was inconvenient to move it?” she asks. “That’s what this feels like.”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Heller House Hits the Market Today

After being on sale informally for a couple of weeks, a treasured Frank Lloyd Wright design in Hyde Park, the Isidore H. Heller House, officially hits the market today. Completed in 1897, the residence signaled Wright’s turn away from the richly ornamented style of his boss, Louis Sullivan…

By Dennis Rodkin

January 25, 2012, 9:35 am

The Isidore H. Heller House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

After being on sale informally for a couple of weeks, a treasured Frank Lloyd Wright design in Hyde Park, the Isidore H. Heller House, officially hits the market today. Completed in 1897, the residence signaled Wright’s turn away from the richly ornamented style of his boss, Louis Sullivan. That change is immediately visible on the home’s façade: the top floor is wrapped with Italianate pillars and panels that depict gowned maidens; the second floor has brick striping and more abstracted pillars; and the rectilinear mass of the ground floor anticipates Wright’s later Prairie-style homes.

“[The house] is a fine work of art that we’ve been lucky to live in,” says Emily Novick. She and her husband, Steven Goldstein, have owned the home since 2004. The physician-in-chief at Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago, Goldstein became provost of Brandeis University last June.

The listing agent, Diane Silverman of Urban Search, officially lists the house for sale today at $2.5 million. Click through the photos below for a tour.

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