Hampton Avery Architects

We Got An Award!

The City of Chicago was nice enough this morning to give one of our projects a 2009 Chicago Landmark Award for Preservation Excellence. The project in question was the interior and exterior renovation with an addition, to a house in the Logan Square Boulevards Landmark District. Other award recepients this year included the restoration of the Palmer House Hilton on State Street, The West Town State Bank Building at Madison & Western, 310-318 S. Michigan Ave (the ‘beehive’ building), The Quinn Chapel, and the South Shore Cultural Center, among others. The ceremenony, which was held in the newly restored Honore Room at the Palmer house, was presided over by David Mosena, the Chairman of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. 35th Ward Alderman Rey Colon joined the clients and myself in accepting the award.

This was a nice end to a six year long project that saw 3 contractors, a lengthy landmarks review process, a trip to the building board of appeals, and a lot of work on the part of us and the client.

When we first saw the house in January of 2003, it looked like this:

It had been badly abused and not well maintained over the years. It had 3 layers of siding on top of the original, the floor of the front porch was missing, leaving a very odd space that was capped at one end with this lovely architectural artifact:

In addition to a complete interior renovation (I’ll have to save that for a later day), we reconfigured and replaced the windows, stripped the siding down to the original cedar, replicated the rotted corinthian columns, and of course, rebuilt the porch:

Our clients liked the house, but they LOVED the 50 foot lot. Essentially they bought a wide lot that happened to have a house on it.

Now that the house is done, the real fun of landscaping starts. Work on the side yard has begun, first with a terrace composed of white crushed sandstone that will eventually be surrounded by box hedges.