In 1907 Harold McCormick bought a 260 acre site, including a
70-foot bluff on Lake Michigan in Lake
Forest, IL. McCormick hired an architect named Frank Lloyd
Wright (b. 1867) to make a design, which was done. However, Wright was
dismissed when McCormick’s wife, Edith Rockefeller McCormick (the daughter
of John D.) decided to move in a different direction and create an Italian
style villa, the supreme style of the higher echelons of society. Perhaps
she had been influenced by Edith Wharton’s 1905 non-fiction book, Italian Villas and Their Gardens.
Charles Platt (1861-1933), an architect and landscape architect from New
Hampshire who had had his sketches of Italian Renaissance gardens
popularized in a 1893 Harper’s
Magazine and via his own 1894 book, Italian Gardens, was hired to execute plans for the house
and landscape. Harold McCormick wrote to Charles Platt: “Mrs. McC inclines
to being partial to Italian style. Very glad you’re coming.” (1908).
Platt’s design resulted in Villa
Turicum (built 1908-1918), an Italianate mansion with a huge
greensward entrance mall on the west and an intricate water chain pouring
down to the lake on the same axis to the east. Curving steps, terraces, the
water chain, and stone dolphins were all built into the bluff, and the
Italian influence even dated to the Roman Age: included in the landscape
was a Pompeian-red atrium with fountain. Not far away Harold’s brother,
Cyrus, was creating a very naturalistic, idealistic estate: ‘Walden’ (named
for Thoreau’s book), so two large themes in American landscape architecture
of the time were contrasted in these neighboring estates. Edith and Harold
divorced, and Edith spent most of her time living in Chicago, where she
entertained lavishly and supported the Chicago Opera, James Joyce, and
other causes. Villa Turicum,
however, was always fully staffed. In 1932, bankrupted by the stock market
crash, Edith R. McCormick died $2 million in debt. The house was long
abandoned and demolished in 1965, and the property was extensively
sub-divided. But the water chain leading to the lake, has, in the past
three years, been marvelously restored by its current owners, mostly from
original stone found scattered on the bluff. The twin walkways on either
side now lead again to the lake’s edge, where a long tunnel (now sealed)
once led to an elevator that carried guests back up to the house from the
beach, where a swimming pool was located. A lily pool to the south of the
mansion has also been restored (though not the lilies), although the sunken
gardens formerly surrounding the lily pool are now gone. Charles Platt
often worked in collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted’s sons, John and
Frederick, Jr., who continued their father’s design business. Following Villa Turicum, Platt created
master plans for PhillipsAcademy in Andover, MA
(1922-1930), and the University of IL at
Champaign-Urbana (1921-1933). Arthur Miller of the Lake
ForestCollege Library and
I recently led a site tour sponsored by the ChicagoBotanic
Garden. It was great to feel the vision of Charles Platt,
and to see the grandeur and scope of his plan for an enormously wealthy
couple in the age before taxation. And one could also hear in the background
the words attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, who grumbled that Platt “was a
very dangerous man — he did the wrong thing so well.” Both Villa Turicum and Walden are
important sites to preserve, part of our unique American landscape
architecture.
:: The
Villa Exteriors ::
The View East to Lake Michigan
The Loggia & Terrace
Detail of the SE Corner
Detail of the South Front
Southern Exposure
SouthGarden Elevation
The Cut-FlowerGarden
The Villa Turicum
Rendering dated April 28, 1918, by Schell Lewis, of
wrought iron entrance gates for Villa Turicum
My brother stumbled across the Villa Turicum website and sent it to our
entire family. I found it fascinating as we grew up in Lake Forest, first on Westleigh Road then later Mayflower Road. Anyway, we used to
play on the 'old McCormick estate' all the time. I am not sure what it
looks like these days, but I can remember the pool. It was literally in
the lake, yet still
had the shape. The pool house (I think that is what it was), that we were
convinced was haunted. Although there was graffiti everywhere, I could
tell in it's day was quite something as there were still remnants of
beautiful
cornicing and high ceilings. I also remember the stairs leading down to
the
pool with the shells that were the trickling fountain. The main house was
completely gone yet there were still parts of the formal garden. My dog
once fell into the pond thinking the moss, that had covered the surface,
was
grass. I had often wondered what the main house looked like and thanks to
your website I now know it was everything I had dreamed it was, a grand
and glorious mansion. Also, there was a story about how before the main
house was finished a clairvoyant told Mrs. McCormick that if she spent
one night
in her new house she would never wake up alive. So rumour has it she
never spent one night in her new house, apparently she only slept in the
coach house…
CHICAGO — Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick is the
reincarnation of the first wife of Tutank Hamen, according to the "Chicago Herald's" report of
a fashionable dinner, where the former wife of Mr. Harold F. McCormick made
the revelation. Mrs. McCormick's experiences as a wife of Tutank Hamen were
hardly less interesting than her experiences in her second incarnation.
Born the daughter of John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, she
soon became the social queen of Chicago. During the past eight
years, Mrs. McCormick has lived most of her time in Zurich, Switzerland, where she studied
psychoanalysis.
