Restoration:
Investment, Research, and Ingenuity
Homeownership is often an adventure, an exercise in patience, and a challenging learning experience. This is especially true for owners of notable historic houses. Restoring the Goodrich House has been a 25-year project for the owners of this early Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house.
While enhancing the home for modern living, they have carefully researched the house’s history, and have respected, replicated, and restored its original features and character. They have also made the building much more energy efficient.
Workers rebuilding the restored front stairs, October 2024. Photo by Julia Bachrach.
Prior to the current owners, five families occupied the Goodrich House, one of them for as long as 41 years. Most of these families made renovations and alterations, creating a layer-cake of changes. In 1999, the current owners took up residence after simply refinishing the floors. They loved the house, despite the overly-varnished woodwork and a dysfunctional kitchen.
Not surprisingly, the kitchen was the first major project to be tackled. Work then began on updating the heating system and removing dark stain from the woodwork. In another early phase, contractors removed a powder room and a coat closet to recreate Wright’s spacious entry hall layout.
When the current owners purchased the house, the kitchen was crowded into a dark corner behind a peninsula and a bank of hanging cabinets. As part of the project, they removed the sliding glass doors to create kitchen space suitable for a contemporary family, 2000.
Front stair hall, showing painted woodwork and carpet, 1962.
By the early 1970s, the Goodrich House had undergone many alterations including the third-storey dormer, enclosed porch with jalousie windows, and a two-tone white and gray-blue paint scheme, 1973. Photo by Richard Guy Wilson Courtesy of University of Virginia.
The remodeling project included a large central island that provides workspace and seating, and a functional perimeter of cabinets, range, sink and refrigerator. View taken from the same angle, 2024.
Restored woodwork, 2025.
From the beginning, the owner gradually undertook intensive research. He found a series of house plans Wright had created for Charles E. Roberts, on which the Goodrich House was based. He also gathered relevant maps, including a 1908 Fire Insurance Map which shows the footprint of the Goodrich House at that time.
This 1908 Fire Insurance Map shows the Goodrich House on its standard-size lot at 534 N. East Avenue (upper-right). Interestingly, it also includes two other Wright designs, the Edwin and Mamah Borthwick Cheney House, two doors down on a somewhat larger lot at 520 N. East Avenue and the Rollin and Elizabeth Furbeck House at 515 Fair Oaks Avenue.
This page of Robert Furhoff’s Interior Color Investigation Report shows the warm and rich colors originally used in the living room, 2007. Note the true colors are not represented by this reproduction.
The owners became curious about the original interior finishes of their home. They had workers pull down muslin from some of the first story interior walls. To determine the original colors beneath the old fabric, they consulted with Jo Hormuth and Robert A. Furhoff, Chicago historic paint analysis experts. This project suggested that alterations had been made to the first story front rooms no earlier than 1908, after Harry Goodrich and his second wife Louise De Forrest Goodrich sold the house.
The report provided the owners with the original colors to assist them in restoring the living room, dining room, and front hall.
Dorothy and William Ross House, Glencoe, Illinois. Photo courtesy of Eifler & Associates.
Early on in the project. Eifler & Associates began using 3D drawings to help envision the changes they were proposing. Note that this plan shows the original colors identified by the Furhoff Report.
Soon after beginning the first-story restoration, they hired Eifler & Associates and the Bosi Company. Architect John Eifler has worked on the preservation of over a dozen Wright-designed buildings. The owners established a highly collaborative relationship with both firms which has continued for nearly two decades. John Eifler and his project manager, Gil Galan, appreciate having clients who are devoted to finding high quality solutions for preserving their historic home. Eifler recently said this collaboration has been “like having a client more intense than a museum curator restoring a historic building.” He added, “I have never worked with a client who is as involved and who has worked so carefully to ensure that things are done properly.”
In addition to delving deep into archives and making a careful study of other Wright-designed homes to analyze the history of the Goodrich House and many of its details, the owner’s role as a research partner has included finding practical, energy efficient solutions that can be integrated into the restoration project. Interestingly, a few years after Eifler began working on the Goodrich House, he saved the Ross House in Glencoe, a 1915 Wright-designed residence that had been listed as one of the state’s most endangered historic sites. In restoring the building as his own family home, Eifler adopted some techniques that had been developed for the Goodrich House.
After making a study of efficient, green energy technologies, the owners decided to install a ground-source geothermal heating and cooling system. This is believed to be the first Wright home in the nation to adopt this technology. While work was going on in the front yard for the geothermal wells, the basement was also excavated. In addition to providing space for mechanical equipment, the project created nearly a foot of headroom, allowing for a comfortable new family room in the front of the basement and modernized laundry and service areas in the rear. The owners returned to the basement for additional work in 2014, waterproofing, insulating and laying drain tile around the foundation’s exterior.
New caption, circa 2006.
View of the original tall hall window and the new storm window.
The project included extensive insulation, high-efficiency furnace, and a heat pump. Recently as additional work was being done on the second floor, the owners found old newspapers that had been left under the floor adjacent to a radiator. This discovery clued them into the fact that the house’s heating system was first modernized in 1914.
The owners found this Chicago Daily News clipping of October 26, 1914 when floorboards were removed beneath an upstairs radiator.
One of the challenges of this project was achieving energy efficiency and interior comfort without sacrificing historic preservation. Windows were restored throughout the house with custom-designed storm windows that replaced the aging aluminum triple-track storm windows. The ten-foot stair hall window provided its own challenge. A long piano hinge was used to hang a storm window made with a ten-foot single pane of glass. The hinge allows easy access for cleaning.
The approach has been to carefully restore the primary facades to Wright’s original design. When they purchased the home, the roof’s deep, dramatic eaves sagged terribly. In restoring the roof, the eaves were rebuilt with steel supports. The front dormer, which had been added in 1929, was leaking badly. It was removed and the original roofline recreated. On the third story gable ends, missing original windows were fabricated with careful attention to the molding profile around the diamond-shaped panes. The deep front porch, providing views up and down the tree-lined street, was reopened. Greater liberties were taken on the rear façade where replacement dormers, modeled on Wright’s designs for others houses in the Charles E. Roberts Development Plan, were installed.
With living space in the basement, the Goodrich house needed another point of egress, so the owners built an addition to the basement and added a sunroom above with an exterior staircase. Providing a basement storm shelter and a bright, beautiful, red-tiled, vaulted room on the back of the house, this is a favorite space for the whole family. A deck was created connecting the new room to the kitchen and providing outdoor seating.
Eifler & Associates and Bosi Construction recently completed additional interior work. This has included reconfiguring the bedrooms, installing new oak trim, and restoring pine trim in the back bedroom. A section of original plaster was retained under glass in a closet.
The Goodrich House after the original colors were restored, 2025.
Primary bedroom and bath after restoration, 2024.
Goodrich House, 2018, courtesy Douglas Steiner.
The owners of the Goodrich House received a Wright Spirit Award from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in 2023 for their many years of meticulous care and restoration. Barbara Gordon, Executive Director of the Conservancy said the owners “are very deserving of this award because of their long-time, dedicated stewardship and their efforts, which have brought the Goodrich House back to Wright’s original design intent.” They hope that other historic home owners can find inspiration and lessons about how to preserve the essential character of an older residence while also making it energy efficient and fit for modern living.
This view shows the Goodrich House’s color scheme when the owners bought the property in 1999.
Over the years, the exterior of the Goodrich House had been painted many times. When the owners purchased the building, it had strongly contrasting cream colored stucco and brown clapboard and trim. For color analysis on the exterior, Robert Furhoff collaborated with Robert G. Fitzgerald, another historic color expert. Fitzgerald conducted an analysis of the house’s original exterior paint colors and authored the final report. His findings showed that Wright’s original scheme was warm gold stucco, with the clapboard and most other wooden elements painted a similar shade of “Hathaway gold,” and other elements such as casements and sashes in a yellowish red color.
Goodrich Garage/Coach House, 2024.
Eifler & Associates designed a new garage with living space above and a pottery studio below, blending details from the main house with other Wright designs. The owners were deeply involved in the design of this compact and highly-detailed ancillary structure built to respect the mature burr oak next to it.