Award-Winning 'Glade House' Listed For $2.3M In Lake Forest

LAKE FOREST, IL — An award-winning contemporary downtown Lake Forest design that hearkens back to the town's long-lost agrarian architectural forms hit the market Tuesday with an asking price of $2.3 million. Four generations have built their family homes on the Green Bay Road property across the street from St. Mary's Catholic Church, according to its listing.

Dubbed the Glade House and protected from demolition by a protective covenant, architect Frederick Phillips designed the home in 2000 for his mother, putting all the main rooms on a raised main level, surrounded by windows overlooking the woods.

Architect Henry Ives Cobbs and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted first designed a house and barn for Chicago attorney's dairy farm on the land, Chicago Magazine reported in 2008. The lawyer's daughter married architect Edward Bennett, designer of Chicago's Buckingham Fountain and co-author with Daniel Burnham of the 1909 plan of Chicago. Bennett's son then married Phillips' mother, Katherine Bennett, who the just-listed house was built for.

Phillips, the architect behind the environmentally focused Deerpath Farms development in Mettawa, said the Green Bay Road home's materials were selected to blend with nature and reference the formerly rural feel of the area, aiming to give it a more informal feel with cedar siding and shingles.

"We really wanted to do something that was similar to what Howard Van Doren Shaw did further north at Ragdale," Phillips said in a 2008 interview about the house. "One of the things that we were proud of was that we were able to site this house in a Frederick Law Olmsted landscape without tearing down one single large tree. At the same time we wanted the house to take advantage of its setting within the trees. For that reason we were very generous with the number of windows."

The house was first placed on the market in 2004 with an asking price of $2.6 million. The price was reduced to $2 million and again to $1.6 million after Phillips and his brother placed protective covenants into the home's paperwork, protecting future property owners from demolishing it. Developers had "circled like vultures," hoping for an opportunity to raze the house and replace it with a larger design, he told the magazine in March 2008, after Brian and Ingrid Biela bought the property for $1.3 million.

The Bielas expanded the house in 2017 to add a master wing, bathroom, third car garage, mudroom, exercise room, theater room and more, according to its listing. A wine cellar and home office were also updated. The home includes a cedar terrace on its second story and a spacious patio on the south side and fire pit. It also features teak windows, a zinc-coated copper roof and radiant heating in all its floors, according to the property description from listing agent Marina Carney.

"The warmth of a summer night drenched in the golden sun of dusk will draw you in for a night of magic watching fireflies dancing amongst the grasses, until the cool of the night beckons one to the open flames of the fire pit, snacking on the sun-kissed strawberries from your very own organic garden," it said.

Brian Biela, the home's seller, said his family has planted oaks and other trees around the house in recent years that have intensified the feeling of living in a treehouse, telling Crain's Chicago Business it feels "like you're suspended in the trees."

The house was named a winner of the 2009 AIA Housing Awards from the American Institute of Architects. According to the description: "This house mediates between the common and the unexpected. In a community where large traditional houses prevail, this house seeks a return to simple agrarian forms, colors, and textures typical to the region, but lost long ago."

• Address: 540 N. Green Bay Road, Lake Forest
• Built: 2005
• Lot Size: 1.5 acres
• Square Feet: 5,080
• Bedrooms: 4
• Bathrooms: 5 full, 2 half
• Last Sold: $1.3 million in 2008
• Asking Price: $2.3 million on June 30

Listing information originally appeared on realtor.com. For more information and photos, click here.