In the
ancient Roman world an annual summer's rustication in the country was considered an
essential feature of the civilized life. Appropriately, the finest expression in the
Chicago suburbs of a country villa was built on the Roman model. It even had a Roman
name, Villa Turicum. That the house was designed in this style is symbolic of an
important watershed in taste in Chicago. Shortly after the turn-of-the-century when
Harold McCormick and his wife, the former Edith Rockefeller, decided to build in the
exclusive north shore suburb of Lake Forest they went to none other than Frank Lloyd
Wright, who projected for them a grandiose but contemporary-style dwelling. Already,
though, Chicago's rich were turning away from local designers, who, curiously, seemed to
them slightly old-fashioned, and were employing East Coast architects who were creating
sensational palaces at Newport and on Long Island in a dazzling variety of
historical-revival styles. The McCormicks, to the lasting astonishment of Wright,
rejected his plans and commissioned the New York Beaux-Arts architect, Charles Adams
Platt, to build their house.
 Villa Turicum |
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What they got was something far
different from what Wright had proposed, but there can be no doubt that the
forty-four-room villa Platt built between 1907 and 1912 was one of America's most
sensational country places. Platt, whose Italian Gardens of 1894 was a
landmark in the field of landscape design, set his villa in the midst of 250 lakefront
acres of beautifully planned grounds.
A man who loved to work in the
Italian Renaissance mode, Platt created a drawing room that was a masterpiece of that
period with elegant, cool, green marble walls rising to a many-colored coffered ceiling
highlighted with gold.
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The Drawing Room of the McCormick villa with the Pompeiian Room opening on
the right. The marble throughout the house was the finest that could be obtained in
Italy. When this photograph was taken the house was already a ruin and had a
$160,000 tax lien on it. 1947 |
The Pompeiian room was a version of
the recently excavated Casa Dei Vetti, and its dark-red frescoed walls and antique columns
and statues show the sure touch of an architect who was president of the American Academy
in Rome.
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The Pompeiian Room
The photograph was taken as the contents pf the house were being auctioned off a
year after Edith Rockefeller-McCormick's death. The women in the photograph is not a
member of the family. 1934 |
Villa Turicum, which had cost
$5,000,000 to build, was sold in 1947 for $46,000 and was demolished in 1956.
(Information on this page and
photographs with the exception of the top left one are from "Chicago Interiors, Views
of a Slendid World" by David Lowe, published in 1979.)
Villa Turicum Index |