“It’s a beautiful house, with a wow factor,” said Kristin Luu, an executive search consultant who bought it with her husband, Minh Luu, a surgeon. She said they were not necessarily looking to save a threatened house but “saw all that charm. You don’t have to be a preservationist to love it.”
The house, on about one-third of an acre, has “rolled eaves,” where the shingled roof curves down at the edge, a tall stone chimney at one end of the brick and stone exterior and leaded glass windows. Inside are beamed ceilings, hefty wood doors and carved wood trim on windows and the staircase. It has had a few additions since its original construction in 1925.
“It’s a little hard to believe, but we did it,” said Bollaert, who put the Arlington Avenue house on the market in June with the explicit goal of selling to people who would keep it standing despite rampant teardown pressure in Elmhurst.
“It’s very cool, because Elmhurst has had a lot of teardowns,” said Paula Pezza, the Pezza Realty agent who represented the Luus. Elmhurst has been teardown country for at least two decades, with smaller homes like this one, 3,400 square feet, frequently replaced by new houses twice their size or more.
“I’m proud that someone wanted to protect this one,” Pezza said.
Zook, the architect of many distinctive homes in Hinsdale and other suburbs, is best known for a pair of Art Deco landmarks, the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge and the St. Charles Municipal Building.
“The character and charm that Zook put into this house — a tall stone chimney, wood beams,’” Bollaert said when she was putting it on the market in June. “If you tear that down, you’ll never see houses like this again.” Her listing agent, Tom Makinney of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate, said the threat of demolition was “significant.”
In the year prior to Bollaert putting the house up for sale in June, 46 replacement houses sold in Elmhurst. Of 66 houses listed in Elmhurst today, 19 are new construction on old lots.
In 2002, Bollaert’s parents, Reg and Fran Darley, had already lived in the Cotswold Cottage-style house for 38 years when they confronted the possibility of demolition. That year, they put the house on the market, and what surfaced was “an avid interest in buying the property to tear it down,” the Chicago Tribune reported at the time.
“That just broke my heart,” Fran Darley told the Tribune, “and I said, ‘I’ll just live here until I die before I sell this home and let someone tear it down.’” Fran Darley died in 2017, and Reg Darley died in 2023. Despite their pledge to keep the house from being demolished, they never obtained landmark status that would protect it.
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