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Welcome back to Period Dramas, a weekly column that alternates between rounding up historic homes on the market and answering questions we’ve always had about older structures.
With a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, David Adler made a name for himself as an architect to Chicago high society.
Largely influenced by the architecture of France and England, Adler’s spaces, while luxurious, were often marked by a sense of restraint. By the peak of his career, in the 1920s, the Gilded Age was over. The rich shifted their lifestyles away away from the rigid formality represented by Newport mansions and toward more simplified dwellings, like the ones Mott Schmidt was designing in and around New York City.
But make no mistake: Adler’s grand houses were still built to impress. The lines of Adler’s rooms and the types of decoration used, however, tended to be more refined, pulled back, and pared down.
What Adler may be most well-known for is how well his rooms flowed from one to the next. His grandest houses generally had only a few rooms per floor, each of which was interconnected and usually opened onto a generous central hall.
While some of his houses have been transformed into businesses, like Castle Hill in Massachusetts, many of his designs still exist as private residences. Here are our favorites on the market right now.
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