A mansion of brick, wood and glass that the prolific modern architect Edward Dart designed in Lake Forest in the early 1960s is for sale.
Priced at just under $3.9 million, the home on Old Mill Road, 7,700 square feet on 17 acres with a pool and horse facilities, appears to be on the market for the first time since it was built in 1964. See more photos below.
Dart designed the house with arched doorways and a large arched fireplace in the brick walls, a sloping wood-beamed ceiling, brick floors and walls of glass. It’s a serene composition of earthen materials with broad views out to the pool and the wooded acreage.
The architect of many modernist houses and churches in the Chicago area, Dart also led the design team for Water Tower Place and designed two buildings at Northwestern University, the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall and the Norris University Center. He died in 1975 at age 53. Dart designed the six-bedroom house for Leonard Florsheim Jr., the head of a camera manufacturer, and his wife, Nancy Florsheim. Leonard’s father founded the precursor to the car rental company Hertz and Chicago Motor Coach, a private bus fleet later purchased by the Chicago Transit Authority. He died in 1977. Nancy died in 2014.
Homes by Dart have been selling quickly recently. In Wheaton, a smaller house Dart designed in 1957, using a similar palette of materials to the Florsheim home, went under contract three days after it came on the market July 14 at $289,900.
A Barrington Hills house that Dart designed for himself and his wife in the early 1950s was sold recently by longtime owners to a couple who plan to rehab it.
It appears the Lake Forest house is being sold by Nancy Florsheim’s estate. Lake County property records do not clearly indicate a change of ownership since the original owners died, and the listing agent, Ann Lyon of @properties, did not respond to a request for comment.
Though the Florsheim name is best known as a shoe brand, Leonard Florsheim Jr. was part of a different branch of the family. The shoe wing of the family also had homes in the area, including 55 acres that was sold to a subdivision builder in 1985 and 40 acres that is now the Florsheim Nature Preserve in Lincolnshire
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