Vintage Villa for Sale or Rent

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In 1919, E. Lichtstern (we don’t know his first name), the bachelor son of the grain broker Adolph Lichtsternbuilt, built the house in part as a place to entertain the woman he loved, the opera singer Mary Garden, a soprano with the Chicago Opera Association. The house had 22 rooms, but only two main bedrooms—one for Lichtstern, the other for Garden. (This does not include the six or more servants’ bedrooms in the house, or the other bedrooms in the coach house.)
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The house’s architect was Arthur Huen, who had designed Mellody Farm, the J. Ogden Armour estate in Lake Forest. At the Lichtstern home, guests would arrive at this stone-walled arcade, with the entry drive on the right, the sprawling lawn on the left (where there is now a pool), and the entrance to the house at the end of the arcade.
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An indoor arcade, perpendicular to the one outdoors, is a showpiece of restoration. When the Nasatirs bought the house, the groined plaster ceilings and limestone walls were darkened by years of grime and mold.
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The living room, 40 feet long and 23 feet wide, has plaster details embossed on both the ceiling and the walls. The Nasatirs restored it all—as well as all the plaster walls throughout the house.
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A plaster panel on a living room wall
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From a set of Palladian windows on the living room’s east side, the wisdom of the home’s siting becomes apparent. While it has a broad view of the lake, the house is set back from the bluff by about 50 yards, its windows framing views of a tree-covered knob of land before the drop down to Lake Michigan. “That makes it a four-season view,” Mike Nasatir says. “We see the green buds come out in the spring, and we see the fall color on the trees.”
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The terrace and a viewing pavilion on a wet day
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Now used as a family room, the library at the north end of the main floor is paneled in walnut, with an ornate plaster ceiling above.
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A fireplace inglenook in the library
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The dining room, 35 by 21 feet, is at the south end of the house’s main wing. Restoration here went beyond the plaster walls and ceiling, the wall of lake-facing windows, and the marble floors. The Nasatirs also restored a massive dining table (covered in this photo) that is presumed to be part of the room’s original furnishing.
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A detail of the intricately laid marble floor and base molding in the dining room
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While creating a modern family-oriented kitchen in what used to be a series of smaller spaces used by servants for food preparation, the Nasatirs combined a taste for today’s appliances with a fondness for the home’s origins. The left half of the island incorporates a long board sink and granite top that was part of the servants’ kitchen area. It’s a souvenir, “something you really like if you ‘get’ this kind of house,” Nasatir says.
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What was once a blank wall was opened up with pairs of French doors that allow light into the kitchen’s breakfast area.
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A view from the house through a walled courtyard toward the coach house, which is now a separately owned property. Nasatir says there was originally a tunnel connecting the two buildings.
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A detail view of a plaster corbel in the second-floor hallway
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The master suite spans the north end of the house, with a seating bay overlooking the ravines toward the lake and, on the lawn side, a big sitting room (not pictured) beyond a row of folding doors.
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A view of the original ornamental woodwork in the master bedroom, shown between murals painted in the 1990s
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This room is the only one in the house that has not had its wood trim entirely stripped of layers of paint. Originally some sort of sitting room, it lies between the master suite where Lichtstern slept and the suite that Mary Garden used.
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Mary Garden’s suite included this large, lake-facing bedroom, a parlor or dressing area, and a bathroom.
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The embossed decorations on the wood cabinetry in Mary Garden’s dressing area were invisible when restoration began. “There was so much paint on them, we could tell there was something under there,” Nasatir says, “but we couldn’t see what it was.”
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The Nasatir children had their own small office in a room where a barber would groom Lichtstern.
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The house’s ballroom could accommodate 200 guests. The windows at right look out to the lake; at left, they face the lawn and the pool. Beyond the far wall is a room where musicians would sleep and rehearse. Elsewhere on this top level of the house are women’s and men’s salons.
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A view of the grounds toward the lake, from the ballroom level. While the property now has a wide apron of tableland before it slopes down into the ravines, Nasatir says that, when he arrived, erosion had destroyed the entire apron. “You couldn’t walk around the outside of the house,” he says. Restoration entailed filling in what erosion had removed.
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A detail on the restored ballroom ceiling—not gold leaf, but gold paint and embossing

By Dennis Rodkin

December 16, 2009, 7:48 am

Mike and Robin Nasatir spent much of the 1990s restoring a country villa in Highland Park that had been built in 1919 for a wealthy bachelor and his paramour, the opera singer Mary Garden. Now, with their two children almost grown, the Nasatirs are ready to move from the 22-room house. Because selling the house could take a long time in the stalled luxury home market, the couple has decided to offer the place for rent—at $35,000 a month. The house is also for sale—at $7.75 million—but Mike Nasatir notes that he and his wife were asking the same amount for the house back in 2001, the last time they considered moving. (Each time the house went on the market, real-estate agents established its asking price by evaluating comparable properties that were on the market.) “I’d rather hold onto it for a few more years and see if [the value of the property] goes up,” Nasatir says.

The Nasatirs have a lot invested in the house—not only financially, but also emotionally. They paid $2 million for the place in 1991 and spent another $4 million on renovations during their first years of ownership, Nasatir says, followed by more outlays that he wouldn’t specify. Their emotional investment is unquantifiable, but as Nasatir walked me through the house last week—describing the process of lowering floors in one wing to make them level with those in the other wing; detailing the methods for removing eight decades of grime from porous limestone walls—it was clear that his connection to the project was deep.

When the Nasatirs approached the Baird & Warner agent Karen Skurie about representing the house, they planned only to rent it. Skurie says that she urged them to also offer the house for sale. Both Skurie and Nasatir say that they consider the home a very rentable place. “Somebody who can entertain at the level of this house is out there,” Skurie says.

My photo tour follows; be sure to click through for more on the history and renovation of the villa.

Also: If you are looking for tours of slightly more modest homes, my colleague Rochelle Vayo Adkinson, host of CLTV’s HomesPlus show, is recapping some of her favorite video tours of the past year on the weekends of December 19th and 20th and December 26th and 27th.

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