Renovated midcentury house in Glencoe for sale

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.

Half a century after it was built by a trailblazing woman who was a homebuilder, Betsy and Jon Tilkemeier gave this Glencoe house a thorough makeover, and they’ve been refreshing it continually in the two decades since.

Built by Greta Lederer in 1951, the house on Stonegate Terrace “is very light throughout,” Betsy Tilkemeier said. “Wherever you are, you can see the outdoors, which is important here where you live indoors for so much of the year.”

In successive rounds of updates since 2001, the couple has updated the kitchen and baths and commissioned built-ins in several rooms, including a vintage-looking banquette and a unique dog crate built into a wall. They put on a new standing-seam metal roof and landscaped the yard in a midcentury-inspired style, a mix of pots and furniture, fountains and lawn.

With their two kids grown, the Tilkemeiers, who run a consulting business together, are planning to move to Florida and take on another renovation project. They’re putting the three-bedroom house on the market the week of June 26 at $1.7 million. It’s represented by Glo Rolighed of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate.

Lederer built the house at the dawn of what would become a prolific career building North Shore homes from the early 1950s through the late 1970s. Built in 1951, it is one of the first Lederer did after an architect designed a traditional home for her and her apparel executive husband, Jack, that she described as “unimaginative” and opted not to move into. She began building less formal, more open modern homes. They suited the modern taste of a generation moving out from the city to the suburbs.

Just a few years later, Lederer was a force in North Shore homebuilding, completing $10 million worth of modern homes by 1957, the equivalent of $108 million today. The Chicago Tribune dubbed her "The Blonde Builder of Suburbs." In 1956, full-page newspaper ads for a development of 100 new houses in Glencoe in advised house hunters that “the most informed buy their homes from Greta Lederer.”

Later described in a Tribune article as “a tall, handsome blonde in her forties who was Miss Detroit of 1930, a model, a showgirl,” Lederer could be found “driving from job to job in a plush yellow auto,” and was photographed wearing a fur coat to inspect one of her Glencoe subdivisions.

This front yard fountain is one of two that flank the family room. The other is in the backyard. There's always water to look at right outside the windows, even if the plantings have gone gray for winter, Betsy Tilkemeier said.

In the living room, the painted brick fireplace is original. The Tilkemeiers understood that “most people would have ripped out that midcentury brick and done something marble,” Betsy Tilkemeier said, but they preferred to preserve its historical look.

The parquet flooring here and in other rooms is also original. The built-in bookshelves are an addition, and have a twin across the room, about where the photographer stood to shoot this photo.

There’s little use in preserving the 1950s look of the house if you don’t fit it out with furniture and finishes from the same time. The Tilkemeiers have furnished with this table by Saarinen and other pieces from Knoll and other brands that were popular in the day.

The ceiling light fixture is salvage from a factory in Cleveland.

In their kitchen redo, the Tilkemeiers kept the original galley-style footprint but filled it with sleek modern cabinetry, countertops and appliances, for a blending of the house’s two eras.

The wallpaper used in the kitchen and other main living spaces subtly evokes midcentury patterns without looking gimmicky.

In the breakfast room, a banquette built in recent years evokes the built-ins of the midcentury style. To its right is a built-in of a different kind. Those horizontal bars are the front of a dog crate custom-built inside the wall.

The 1950s meet the 2000s in the family room, where the vertical wood slats used as room dividers back then are used as a wall accent now, and large minimalist cabinets contrast with an antique Coca-Cola machine.

The primary bedroom is as Lederer built it, but it became a primary suite when renovations took space from the old fourth bedroom to make a walk-in closet and an office.

The result of borrowing all that space for the modern components of a suite is that the bedroom “feels more spacious” without the need to jam it with big dressers and other storage, Betsy Tilkemeier said.

Considerably larger than the original, the primary bath is a sleek contemporary mix of colors and textures.

Each of the other two bedrooms also has its own bath. This one is orange, the other bright green. Although it’s contemporary tile, the vivid colors are in keeping with midcentury bathrooms, which came in vivid shades of pink, blue, yellow and other colors.

This fountain in the backyard is the companion to the one in the front yard. They flank the family room on opposite sides.

Combining gravel, large rocks, and other hardscape elements with textural shrubs and a large lawn (not seen off to the right), the landscape design, like the interior design, recaptures a 1950s look for the 21st century.

Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.

The solar panels on the roof are just one piece of the sustainability features that Tom and Judy Casten, parents of U.S. Rep. Sean Casten, added. They're asking $3.5 million for it.

The redesign emphasized making the house, which is coming on the market next week at $5.25 million, lighter and more open throughout.

The home started out as a relatively small single-story house in 1951 and has since evolved over the years. It's for sale at $850,000.