A Man’s Home is His Castle

By Harold Wolff

The Daley administration has a major bungalow initiative in progress, in which they have been joined by the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Not only is there a bungalow association and a bungalow newsletter, but they are to be followed by bungalow tours, a bungalow symposium, and a bungalow exhibition.

The city is making low-cost loans to purchase, restore and expand historic Chicago bungalows, free architectural assistance and expedited permitting for owners engaged in restoration or rehabilitation, and grants to make their homes more energy efficient.

Moreover, Beverly/Morgan Park is providing many of the experts involved in the reborn bungalow movement, including the exhibition curator, the photographer, an essayist and the financial incentivist.

The house at 9757 S. Hoyne, which was built in 1928 for F.C. Rowley from the plans of Roy W. Scott, could be regarded as a bungalow. Despite the soaring gable over the front room, it is basically all on one level and has a typical bungalow arrangement of the rooms. The roof of that soaring gable sweeps down over the front of the house and at the main entrance is the round-tower porch on the 98th Street side.

What sets this house apart is the detailing, which is so extensive as to make us forget that the basic fabric of the house is a dark brick. On the Hoyne Avenue side there is a massive chimney which occupies its own gable and is flanked by arched windows. The chimney itself expands at its base (and there is an interior fireplace which does justice to the chimney and to the high ceiling of that room); and here and there up its full height are accents of stone, particularly on its diagonal slope. The chimney is topped with two Tudor pots. A weathered-green metal heraldic lion catches the eye and lures it up the gable, where it pauses only to note the pair of brackets (for bracing the bargeboards) extending from beam ends on either side.

On the 98th Street side, the soaring gable is topped by an ornament on a bracket and contains a pair of small-paned windows. There is a limestone course beneath these windows, set on limestone block brackets. On the area above the limestone band and surrounding the windows is a raised diagonal pattern formed by the ends of bricks jutting out from the wall and criss-crossing it. Beneath the gable, there is a box bay set on a projecting carved-stone base with stone in its window surround as well.

Next comes the round tower which encloses the entrance porch, and whose decoration includes a blind window and crenellations at the top. Look closely to see the X pattern carved into the limestone blocks in the crenellations.

Beyond the tower is a slightly curved bay with a limestone hood over its row of first-floor windows, probably for the dining room. Above is a vestigial balcony with crenellated rail and two louvers topped with gothic-detailed hoods. The bargeboards of a double gable continue the sense of heights set by the front gable. Behind this is the kitchen, with deeply inset windows under a shield carved on a limestone block and more crenellations at the roofline.

The rear porch, carried at the basement level on a roughly dressed stone arch, is just the right size for storing wood for the fireplace. The rear of the house has a projecting bay with limestone details that mimic the crenellations elsewhere, and three upper windows with their own limestone hood. The garage, though basically a brick cube, reflects the house with crenellations at the roofline, limestone block details at the garage door corners, and a limestone lintel over the rows of windows that face the house.

To regard the sumptuous detailing of the Rowley House as simply an extreme example of the disguising of bungalows that was so often done in the late 1920s is to miss the point. This house is the expression of an owner’s personality, though on the scale of residence which maximized that owner’s comfort level.