Not just historic home owners, but stewards

Thoughtful restorations a common theme in Wright Plus homes

By LACEY SIKORA Contributing Reporter

Wright Plus co-chairs Sue Blaine and Joan Pantsios say that beyond being good stewards of tural le Plus go ab reno their homes sympathetic to the original house.

Often this r form of removing paint. In the Bumstead House, that the original been painted ov ple worked for se strip the paint of the beauty of the homeowners also turned to the original plans house to restore shelvin and woodwork fireplace.

The owners of the Sc in House took restore their home’s woodwork and dows utilizing ov paint stripper and 1,000 steel pads.

At the Cronwall House, the removed a giant fish tank that had been added to the home and library to match the originals

The original light fixtures were missing from the Furbeck Home, so the owners turned to other Wright designs to create their own. The dining room fixture was inspired by the patter n in the original art glass windows in the home.

They used the décor of Browne’s Bookstore in Chicago to inform their library light designs, and the kitchen light design was pulled from Wright’s Dana Thomas House

The owners of the Gale House did paint analyses to determine what the original colors were in Wright’s design. In a second-floor bedroom that was likely a nursery, they decorat- example of restoration.”

The previous owners, the Baehrends, returned the house to single-family status after it had been converted to a two-flat. They used birch wood to match the wood used by Wright in designing a new kitchen and hid the appliances behind cabinet fronts so that they wouldn’t stand out.

The couple also removed a bathroom that a 1950s-era owner had created out of a second-floor terrace. In its place, they created a primary suite bathroom out of an adjacent bedroom, and they sourced a vintage bird-cage shower for the room.

“They are all wonderful stewards,” Blaine said. Blaine and Pantsios said that the spirit of restoration is very evident in Wright’s Home and Studio as well. Converted at one time into six apar tments, the house was in disrepair when the Home and Studio Foundation was for med in 1974 to restore and preserve the house.

Lesniak, who has been with the organization now known as the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust since that time, says the group, headed by architect John Thorpe, wrote the book on historic preservation.

‘The Home and Studio was a unique situation,” Lesniak said. “John Thorpe was the chair of the restoration committee. People did what he said. When you have five or six architects trying to work together, sometimes you need a leader.”

The group created a restoration plan in book form, and Lesniak said it became the pattern for how restorations could be down across the country.