Self-Portrait

The architectural photographer Barbara Karant turns her camera on her house in Bucktown—and on her rescued greyhounds.

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Valerio addressed the interior of Karant's house with the same confident logic that he brought to restoring and rebuilding the exterior. Clarity, balance, and easy access were the point. On the first floor, a tower of glass at the north end, framed by two glass-fronted doors, centers attention on the backyard—a fenced-in greyhound romp-around destination shaded by a tall silver maple. One of Karant's favorite paintings—a complex electric-blue still life by Aaron Bohrod—hangs beside the door on the right. Karant's mother, an actress and drama teacher, bought the painting in the seventies.

The kitchen is tucked in at the south end of the first floor, and the tile above the counters—in orange, apple green, gray, white, and yellow—presented a challenge for Karant. "It's supposed to be a random design," she says, "but because I'm fairly obsessive about things, I couldn't just have the contractor randomly put the tile up." He delivered the tile on a Friday and gave her until Monday to decide how to arrange it. "Then I proceeded to drive myself crazy for the balance of the weekend," Karant recalls, "getting the perfect look of randomness with no apparent pattern to the color."

Valerio calls this side of the house the tower of functions—it comprises the kitch- en and service areas on the first floor; the study and workroom, open to the living room, on the second floor; and the bedroom and master bath on the third floor, with views to the north and the south. "The intention," Valerio says, "is to create a great interior space punctuated by movement up the staircase, which wraps around the tower."

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Photography: Barbara Karant; photo styling by Diane Ewing

This article appears in the October 2007 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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