Property of Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Brooker, Winnetka, Illinois | Architect: I. W. Colburn

10/08/2025 11:11:00 PM

Beautiful and enormously alive, H&G's Hallmark House for 1966 is the second house I. W. Colburn has designed for Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Brooker. The first was in Michigan, this one is in Winnetka, Ill. In both, Mr. Colburn employed the arch-motifs he has made his trademark–an idiom he uses grandiloquently in his churches and elegantly scaled-down in almost every house he designs.

When they moved to Illinois, the Brookers asked simply for a house that would answer their new needs in any version of the architect's style which he thought apt. They expected arches, which they love. In addition, they asked for a plan that would accommodate almost constant entertaining and include three public rooms, a master suite, a bedroom for their younger son (the older is married), a kitchen of some stature, one guest room, and servants' quarters.

These requirements, mundane enough, were satisfied in a wonderfully romantic way characteristic of the new trend toward picturesque and fanciful architecture. Visually delightful inside and outside, the house has a spirit-lifting spaciousness. And although the form and plan are basically simple, the handling of the materials-brick, plaster, terrazzo-adroitly effects elegance and richness.

Light is a tangible element of the design. An atrium dome bathes the center of the house with sunlight, and light through the arches that girdle the house permeates the rooms with a constantly changing pattern of chiaroscuro. A wonderful house for entertaining because of the easy relationships of the rooms to each other, to the outdoors, and to the kitchen, it is also a house enviable for the privacy of its carefully segregated bedrooms.

Built around a domed atrium, the Brookers' house is a snow-white pavilion of painted brick embraced on four sides with a perfectly symmetrical loggia of arches topped with arched finials of interlaced ma- sonry. But beneath this fancifulness lies strict geometric order, for the house is built in 20-foot- square bays-four wide, three deep. The heavily wooded site provides what appears to be idyllic isolation.

There are houses nearby, but they are hidden, in summer at least, by leafy green walls. The greenery stops, however, with the trees. Instead of lawns, the house has a wide border of white gravel- an immaculate handkerchief. (The Brookers do not own a lawn mower, or need one.) This stylish setting is made even more so by a little allée of trees that leads from the road to the gravel turnaround where, by way of welcome, two slim columns topped by bronze birds sculptured by Sylvia Shaw Judson announce to guests that they are now within the gates. At right and left are separate garages, straight ahead, the front door and, above it, the superstructure of the atrium with its sixteen bulls'-eye windows -tower-high portholes that open the center of the house to sunlight and a flurry of summer greenery.