Architect of this Lemont house made the Wright choices

When designing a new house in the mid-1990s for clients who were devotees of Frank Lloyd Wright’s style, architect Louis Narcisi later told a homebuilding magazine, he was careful “to keep all four sides in consideration. You can’t shoot for curb appeal only.”

This was particularly true because the house’s four sides would all look out onto the surrounding property, 7.8 acres in Lemont. Narcisi’s attention that that aspect of the home gave filled the interior with the sense “that you’re always close to nature right outside the windows, says Dave Hetrick, who with his wife, Rhonda, bought the house from the original owners in 2016.

Narcisi didn’t copy a Wright home, he told the Chicago Tribune’s Mary Umberger in 1999, but summoned his knowledge of the masterful architect’s principles to create something new but Wrightian. The house has a low exterior profile evocative of the flat surrounding landscape and banding in stone and wood on the outside that continues in wood on the inside for unity.

With their two kids grown, the Hetricks are in downsizing mode. They’re putting the house, five bedrooms and 6,500 square feet on McCarthy Road on the market March 29. Priced at a little under $2 million, it’s represented by Dan Merrion of Coldwell Banker. Also on the property are a small rental house and a barn, relics of the property’s previous life as a farm.

Wood banding on the walls and ceiling and wood screens “are great to define certain spaces” such as the dining room in a modern open-plan house, Narcisi told Custom Builder magazine in 1999.

It's all light oak in the Lemont house, which along with the crisp white ceilings and many windows makes the interior light.

Narcisi’s firm, Interplan Practice, primarily designed commercial buildings, including shopping centers in Bolingbrook and Palos Park, but had studied Wright and taught courses on his work. The chance to design a Wright-derived house, he told Umberger, gave him a ”fun” dive into “what it takes to do the things (Wright) wanted.”

One of the principles Narcisi incorporated is Wright’s affinity for making transitions a series of incremental changes. That meant tucking beneath a long overhanging roof, making it a halfway point between the outdoors and the indoors.

While Narcisi said it’s not only about curb appeal, Hetrick said this house has it. Set at the end of a long driveway, “it’s a pleasure to see when you drive up,” he said. 

Narcisi intentionally veered off from the Wright approach in the family room, where he inserted the big stone fireplace into a wall of doors and windows.

“Wright always had the fireplace in the heart of the home, as the warm heart of the home,” Narcisi said in 1999. But the kitchen has become more the spiritual center of a home, in large part because families don’t have servants who do the cooking out of sight. Thus, he moved the fireplace to an exterior wall.

“I always felt that it was nice that when a fire is going, you could see the fire and the outdoors at the same time,” Narcisi told the Tribune. 

The family room opens onto a large deck that looks out onto the lawn and the many trees that ring the property. The Hetricks added this, expanding its footprint from a small brick patio, to continue the idea of indoors and outdoors infusing one another.

The Hetricks updated the kitchen with a quartz-wrapped island and grey lower cabinets, while keeping the uppers natural wood to maintain continuity with the wood banding that runs throughout the house.

“Everything we renovated, we tried to maintain the original intent of the design,” said Dave Hetrick, a contractor who does commercial work. “We appreciate the thought that went into those details.”

A stone fireplace contributes to the “peacefulness” of the primary bedroom, Hetrick said. The primary suite is on the first floor.

Renovating the primary bath, the Hetricks added a big copper bathtub, enhancing the throwback to history that the house’s design amounts to. They also updated the shower, building out a larger, more sybaritic version to meet today’s standards. 

This sitting room is the primary bedroom suite’s fourth piece, the third piece being a room-sized walk-in closet. The doors open onto a portion of the deck.

“The primary wing is nice because it’s quiet,” Hetrick said. “There’s nobody there but us.”

The temperature-controlled wine room has a capacity of about 800 bottles. 

Set on a low knoll, the house is cruciform, with its center higher and steps down to the four wings. It’s Narcisi’s take on Wright’s take on the flat planes of the Midwestern landscape.

The stacked stone chimney, overhanging eaves, long horizontal bricks and vertical piers of glass are all nods to Wright’s designs.

Predating the Wrightian house on the Hetricks’ McCarthy Road property are an old barn and outbuilding, as well as a small farmhouse that isn’t seen in this photo. Renters occupy the house and their goats and miniature horse occupy the barn.

The age of the barn is unknown, but the “Albert Mather” sign on it is an authentic remnant of the days when the Mather family grew produce and flowers here, Hetrick said.

The house is about 29 miles southwest of the Loop, near the Cog Hill and Ruffled Feathers country clubs and the 15,000-acre Palos Preserves in the Cook County Forest Preserve system.