Take a look at artifacts saved from a demolished Prairie Style bungalow

Before demolishing a pedigreed Winnetka bungalow, a luxury homebuilder gave a trio of architecture buffs permission to go in and salvage what they could of its original finishes, and the trio emerged with some gems that have not previously been seen publicly.

“This wasn’t about gathering souvenirs; it was about picking up pieces that we can use to document a remarkable house,” said Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s cultural historian emeritus and a longtime student of the work of historical Chicago architects.

Samuelson; Eric Nordstrom, head of Urban Remains, a West Town gallery of architectural artifacts; and cartoonist Chris Ware stripped vintage windows, carved-wood radiator covers, light fixtures and other details out of a bungalow built in 1911 on Essex Road. A developer is planning to replace the small bungalow with an 8,300-square-foot, $3.8 million house.

Although rundown, the bungalow has a distinguished lineage. Its first floor was designed by Walter Burley Griffin, who a few years later would leave Chicago to oversee construction of the Australian capital city he designed. Later, the original owner added a second floor designed by Barry Byrne, known best for his modernist church designs, and Alfonso Iannelli, a noted sculptor and designer. Samuelson said it’s likely that Griffin’s wife, architect Marion Mahony Griffin, also worked on the original, although research has not yet confirmed that.

Prolific North Shore firm Heritage Luxury Builders bought the bungalow in March, after a demolition delay that Winnetka officials imposed on a previous owner expired. The house had no landmark protection that would stop demolition.

After the sale, Nordstrom approached Leo Birov, principal at Heritage Luxury, and secured permission to salvage what they could prior to demolition, which is going on this week. The three major elements of the photo at the top of this story—windows, light fixture and radiator cover—were all claimed by the salvagers.

Some of the windows may go to the Walter Burley Griffin Society and the Winnetka Historical Society, Nordstrom said.

Among the other salvaged items are radiator covers carved with a four-circles pattern that Samuelson said was also in the custom-built furniture that Griffin designed for the house and which shows up in historical photos.

Light sconces and chandeliers, both with strips of glass hanging like pendants, were designed in the Byrne and Iannelli remodeling, Samuelson said, and show “the evolution from Prairie to modernism” that the work of both men would go through.

None of these finishes were visible in recent real estate listings for the home, which was offered primarily as a teardown candidate.

The trio also salvaged a metal fireplace mantel and the bricks in the surrounding wall. They gathered up chunks of walls, in part to unearth the original colors used on the exterior and difficult to decipher from old black-and-white photos.

Nordstrom and Ware are longtime preservationists of historical architecture, but only Samuelson had a long personal relationship with the Winnetka bungalow. As a teenage architecture fan growing up in Rogers Park, he finagled a meeting with Byrne, and later got to know both the architect and his wife, painter Annette Cremin, personally.

Samuelson recalls driving around Winnetka with Cremin several times in the 1970s and passing the Essex Road bungalow. Cremin told him then, “Barry called that his haystack house” for the steeply pitched roof, Samuelson recalls.