It all started with a television set. In 1989, Dollard Carey was living on the 1200 block of Woodbine in Oak Park when he purchased a large TV. That led to his then wife saying that the couple needed a larger house.
Luckily, Carey knew JoAnn Gagliardo of the Gagliardo Realty family, and she knew of a house that was going to be listed in River Forest. The house was in need of renovations, but Carey was taken with the exterior, which resembled a French farmhouse.
Built in 1939, the home had only had one set of owners before Carey purchased it. Architect Jerome Cerny designed the house for the Righeimer sisters. None of the three sisters ever married. Eva was employed as an office clerk, and Lucy and Dolly were Chicago public school teachers. It’s possible that an inheritance from their wealthy uncle enabled the three sisters to buy the home on their modest incomes.
Lucy passed away in 1954, and Eva died in 1957. Dolly lived in the home until her death in 1989 at age 97.
Carey and his first wife tackled aging mechanical systems when they moved into the home.
After a divorce, Carey married Beth, and gradually and carefully they renovated the house to create a kitchen and bathrooms that suit the standards of a more modern era, while keeping much of the home’s original details.
Curved bay windows, round windows and a curved staircase with a wrought-iron handrail are all original. A renovated primary suite bathroom with heated flooring, a guest suite over the garage and a tall basement that includes a family room add to the creature comforts of the house.
The couple worked with a designer to make the house functional for them on the interior; and on the exterior, the home wouldn’t be out of place in a field in France. “I think we have something that’s relatively unique,” Carey said.
The backyard is a tree-filled escape that also offers the perfect place for a dog to play- at least according to Carey’s dog, Cody.
Carey said he wasn’t very familiar with the work of Cerny prior to purchasing the home in River Forest, but that living in the house and discovering other homes on the block that were also designed by Cerny gave him a crash course in his distinct style.
Born in Chicago in 1901, Cerny studied at the School of the Art Institute, the Armour Institute and Yale University. As a young architect, he worked for architects Benjamin Marshall and David Adler, a noted Chicago architect who designed many country homes in the North Shore.
In the 1920s, Cerny studied at the Royal Academy in London, the American Academy of Arts in Rome and Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. During that period in Europe, he traveled to the Normandy region of France, where he was taken with the rambling farmhouses of the region. His sketches from this period informed much of his later career.
Like Adler, when Cerny founded his own firm in 1929, he located it in the North Shore, choosing Lake Forest as an ideal location. While his homes were not the extensive estates that Adler designed, Cerny had notable clients including an Illinois senator and members of the Marshal Field family.
Cerny’ s custom homes were inspired by European charm, and his wife, June, often collaborated on the interiors. While most of his designs are in the North Shore, Oak Park and River Forest are home to more than a few of his designs.
He continued to design homes into the 1960s and often had his work featured in magazines like Architectural Digest, House and Garden and Town and Country. When he died in 1970, he left his firm to a long-time employee, Bob Erdmann, who later partnered with Norman Werner.
Jon Whitney Welker joined Erdmann when Werner passed away. After many years based first in Glenview and then Barrington, the firm returned to Lake Forest in 2014, where Welker continues to run the firm with the focus on Cerny’s designs.
In his research before listing his home, Carey reached out to Welker and found that Welker is winding down his career in architecture. Carey thinks that there is a great opportunity for an architect interested in traditional designs to establish the firm for another 100 years.
The Careys have decided it is time to downsize, and they’ve listed the house at 1339 Forest in River Forest with Louise Nix of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Chicago for $1,689,000.
He hopes that the next owner of the home will appreciate the uniqueness of Cerny’s design and will be another long-term caretaker of the house.
