Once Covered in Mold, a Midcentury Gem Outside Chicago Is Reborn
By Winifred Bird –
An artist recasts the home of a Mies van der Rohe student as a minimalist haven.
Eva Kowalow leans over a table in her Lake Forest, Illinois, painting studio, paging through a sheaf of architectural plans. The plans, each drawn in pencil on yellowing tracing paper and dated 1959 to 1964, depict the 2,960-square-foot house that stands on the same five-acre wooded lot as the studio. On paper, it looks like two neatly stacked rectangles, the top one exactly twice as large as the bottom. In real life, it is a sleek glass-and-steel box floating amid the trees on a wood-paneled pedestal.
Join Dwell+ to Continue
Subscribe to Dwell+ to get everything you already love about Dwell, plus exclusive home tours, video features, how-to guides, access to the Dwell archive, and more.
Try Dwell+ for FREE
You can cancel at any time.
Save