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8/19/2020

Chicago architect Dirk Denison Bannockburn house for sale

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Home  Before It Hits The Market August 18, 2020 05:53 PM

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In Bannockburn, a noted urban architect is turned loose Dirk Denison designed an angular house clad in stainless steel and as much glass as possible to heighten the relationship between the indoors and the prairie. It's for sale at $7.5 million.

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For a verdant natural setting lush with trees and prairie in Bannockburn, Chicago architect Dirk Denison designed a sharp-angled house of steel, glass and stone. It would seem the setting and the house are opposites, but meticulous https://www.chicagobusiness.com/it-hits-market/bannockburn-noted-urban-architect-turned-loose

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Chicago architect Dirk Denison Bannockburn house for sale

attention to every angle turned them into well-matched companions.

Indoors, each room is infused with the outdoors, and from the outside the house looks like a modern sculpture set into a garden.

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“Because of all the windows and all the angles, every room is a different experience of the outdoors,” said Glen Miller, who with his wife, Wendy, built the house on Telegraph Road in 2010. The setting in Bannockburn made his wife's vision possible, he said, "because it's one of the last rural parts of an urban area. Restaurants, train stations and other necessities are all nearby in Deer eld and Highland Park, but “we’re out here where it’s quiet and private.”

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Chicago architect Dirk Denison Bannockburn house for sale Larry Malvin Photography

“We wanted to experience the outside wherever we were,” Miller said. He talks of lounging on the couch and watching hawks soaring above the prairie, or sitting in the indoor hot tub as re ies light up the space outside a glass wall.

Living with nature all around is meaningful to the Millers, who both grew up in West Rogers Park, where, Glen Miller said, “your neighbors were so close you could reach out the window and almost touch them.” The affable Miller, who retired a few years ago from a nancial management role with the billionaire Pritzker family, also talks fondly about pulling his grandchildren on sleds behind an ATV along the prairie paths and making slime with a granddaughter and her friends in the kitchen.

The Millers now plan to downsize out of the ve-bedroom, 14,000-square-foot house on 5.5 acres, built for just the couple after their children were adults. They’ll put it on the market later this month, priced at $7.5 million and represented by Jacqueline Lotzof of @properties.

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A dozen years ago, the Millers bought the site, which at the time had an old barn, a rundown house “that the re department was using for training,” Glen Miller said, and little greenery because horses had grazed there for many years. He recalls his wife saying, “I have a vision” of creating what’s there now—a hard-edged house by Denison, who is known for his edgy contemporary designs, and a landscape of trees, prairie and lawn crafted by landscape design rm Scott Byron. They paid $1 million for the 5.5-acre site.

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Chicago architect Dirk Denison Bannockburn house for sale

Larry Malvin Photography

Denison wrapped the house with as much glass as possible, for the transparency to outside that the couple wanted, and clad the upper parts with stainless steel—including beneath the central roof peak in this image. The stainless steel and the irregular geometry of the roof peaks and angled walls create an amorphous, rarely rectilinear home.

“We don’t live in a box, I’ll say that,” Glen Miller said. “If you went up over our house with a drone, it would look like you were in geometry class.”

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Chicago architect Dirk Denison Bannockburn house for sale

Larry Malvin Photography

With glass on three sides of the living room and windows at various heights, “you really experience the light as it changes during the day and during the seasons,” Glen Miller said. The structure visible outside the windows in the left part of the image is not a neighboring house, it’s another piece of this home, with a landscaped space between the two parts.

Larry Malvin Photography

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Chicago architect Dirk Denison Bannockburn house for sale

This shot of the home’s main living space shows how the angled roofs create an indoor ceiling with the feeling of a canopy. “You never feel contained inside our house,” Glen Miller said. Wood veneer covers many of the solid walls in the house—it’s seen here at the far end of the room. Each piece was selected to showcase its grain. Miller said he has often sat inside by the big windows and observed hawks diving down into the prairie to capture mice, voles or other small prey.

Larry Malvin Photography

The kitchen includes an o ce and an informal dining area. Wood veneer conceals the refrigerator and other appliances, giving the room, and the house overall, a serene, uni ed look. “The fewer materials you use, the better it looks,” Glen Miller said.

The island, big enough for family to gather around, can also accommodate six little girls sprawled on top making slime, Glen Miller said from personal experience.

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Larry Malvin Photography

The kitchen opens onto this screened porch, open on three sides to the landscape. “In good weather, we always eat out here,� Glen Miller said.

Cubs fan Wendy Miller watches games on the television here, he said, but because of a sophisticated technology package built into the house, if she shifts to another room, the same game is on there. The television, electric shades, garage doors, climate and other features are all controlled by a single smartphone app.

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The main bedroom suite has two sleeping rooms and two sitting rooms. This bedroom, part of the suite, has high clerestory windows and opens onto a secluded bit of garden.

Larry Malvin Photography

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Chicago architect Dirk Denison Bannockburn house for sale

This sitting room is between the two sleeping rooms, with garden spaces on either side. (Only one is visible in the photo.)

Larry Malvin Photography

This sitting room opens onto a patio, with a long view into the prairie and surrounding woods. It’s one of the rooms where Wendy Miller likes to sit after sunset with the lights off, to “get absorbed into the quiet outside,” Glen Miller said.

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Chicago architect Dirk Denison Bannockburn house for sale Larry Malvin Photography

Soon after moving into the completed house, Glen Miller sat in the hot tub one summer night, looked out through the glass and saw "the re ies lighting up the prairie. I called my wife and said, 'Here’s one beautiful feature of the house we didn’t pay for. They came because of the prairie.' " The wall is lined with back-painted glass whose glow changes with the light.

Larry Malvin Photography

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