HOME TOUR: HOME AWAY FROM HOME

Escaping the City’s Hubbub in a Highland Park Haven.

Distance is measured in more than miles. A break in routine, an afternoon lost in a book, recreating that dish you tasted on your first trip to Paris—all can be a welcome escape. And getting away from it all doesn’t have to begin with a trip to O’Hare. For one Chicago family, jumping in the car and heading to Highland Park does the trick.

“My clients first rented this house as a weekend getaway during COVID,” says designer Jennie Bishop, who co-founded design firm Studio Gild in 2014 and now operates as Bishop Studio. “They both work a lot and didn’t want to have to pack up the kids and drive to Michigan or Wisconsin. Eventually, they struck a deal to buy it.”

Once it was theirs, the homeowners turned to Bishop and her design team, Hillary Johnson, Taylor Zientek, and Erin Varner, to make the 122-year-old house destination-worthy. “The initial idea was to do a light restoration while maintaining the historic charm,” shares Bishop. “Then we began peeling the onion.” The core of that process was relocating the kitchen and breakfast room from the driveway side of the house to the more practical and inviting poolside of the home. After establishing a design direction and determining the right materials for the newly imagined, sunlit space, Bishop enlisted the help of Michael Rossman of Schaumburg-based Abruzzo Kitchen & Bath. “He’s supremely talented and wonderful to work with,” enthuses Bishop. “I’d bring him onboard every project if I could.”

Although the family may make this their primary residence one day, for now, they wanted a bright and lively contrast to their more buttoned-up Lincoln Park home. “The idea was a place where you could entertain in a cocktail dress one day and spend all day in a swimsuit the next,” says Bishop. Durable, bathing suit-friendly fabrics certainly play a role here, but not at the expense of great style. A mix of high and low—from custom pieces to items from CB2—gives the home a rich, visual punch. A refreshing, free-spiritedness reigns throughout—from the foyer anchored by a round table in ash and steel to the great room set with a deep, comfy sectional in fawn-hued upholstery—breathing new life into the home’s vintage bones.

“This house has a quirky little powder room under the stairs that I didn’t even know was there until I’d visited about six times. We had fun with it, using the Woodland pattern wallpaper from Kravet and installing a boxy wall mount sink and backsplash in marble,” says Bishop.

The TV-free living room is a navy-and-white affair, where two Chesterfield-style sofas face each other over a 9&19 coffee table, an attention-grabbing, multi-level object made of four pieces of beautiful, honed cherry wood. In the breakfast sunroom, Bishop replaced a wood floor with mosaic tile in a geometric pattern and designed a banquette with a playful, postmodern appearance. “It’s all low-slung, cool, and casual,” says Bishop. “And art focused. It’s a big, rambling house with so many walls! I pulled almost everything from one of my favorite galleries, Alma Gallery in Pilsen.”

Off the pool is a space christened the “Cabana Room.” Here, Bishop took a counterintuitive approach. Where one might expect shades of tropical green and rattan furniture, she opted to paint the wainscoting an inky hue and cover the walls (one of which is punctuated with a porthole-like octagonal window) with a paper of white fronds dancing against a dark blue background. For seating, she selected the streamlined Drift Sofa and its companion ottoman from Room & Board.

“What designer doesn’t like to do a secondary home?” muses Bishop, who has designed two previous residences for this family. “Usually, the client is a little more hands-off, a bit more relaxed, and you get to pepper in a little more personality. Projects like this are a perfect example of our design approach—we are always trying to tweak or reinvent a palette, to generate something different, new, and entertaining,” explains Bishop. No doubt her clients are having fun, too, in every room of their ever-so-near, ever-so-dear, home-away-from-home.

For more information, visit bishopstudio.com and @bishopthestudio.