In the 1930s, a small enclave of homes rose up on Chicago’s North Shore, creating a sublime neighborhood that backs onto picturesque dunes and beyond them, Lake Michigan. The houses—Tudor style with classical cut-stone entryways and exteriors of distinctive Wisconsin lannon stone—created a gracious architectural tone. Dense and mysterious, lannon stone was named for William Lannon, who settled in Wisconsin in the early 1800s and, as the legend goes, felt the stones spoke to him, urging him to build a house.
A quarter-century later, a builder filled one of the lots with a 1950s red brick Colonial, a rude interruption that degraded the neighborhood’s identity and historic value. “It did not fit in at all,” says Julie Hacker, principal with her husband, Stuart Cohen, of Cohen & Hacker Architects in Evanston, Illinois. When Cohen and Hacker entered the picture two years ago, a young couple had bought the property, razed the Colonial, and asked Hacker and Cohen—who have spent their careers collaborating in harmonic rhythm—to design a home that did justice to the neighborhood and honored the spirit of North Shore settlements.