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David Adler, a proponent of Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts and its classical teachings of symmetry, balance, and superb proportions and an all-inclusive plan whereby a building relates to its surroundings, was one of America’s most important great-house architects. Born to Isaac David, a prosperous second-generation wholesale clothier, and his wife, Theresa Hyman, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Adler was educated at the Lawrenceville School and Princeton University. After graduating from Princeton in 1904, Adler moved to Europe, where he traveled extensively and studied architecture at the Polytechnikum (1904–06) in Munich and at the École des Beaux-Arts (1908–11), whose curriculum included lessons in structural and technical applications. However, because Adler was interested exclusively in design, he returned to the United States without mastering these key assignments, bringing with him a collection of 500 picture postcards that documented the important architecture and gardens he had seen and to which he referred throughout his 38-year career.

Before venturing out on his own, Adler apprenticed in Chicago in the office of Howard Van Doren Shaw, a devotee of the Arts and Crafts movement. Shaw (1869–1926) was among the most prolific country house architects on Chicago’s North Shore, particularly in Lake Forest, where Adler also forged his eminent reputation.

Henry C.Dangler, Adler’s closest friend from the École and the person who introduced Adler to Katherine Keith, whom he married in 1916, also worked in Shaw’s office. Adler and Dangler did not stay long with Shaw; they decided to form their own partnership. Dangler left first, and Adler remained with Shaw only until he completed the design of his first house (1911), which was for uncle and benefactor Charles A.Stonehill, in the North Shore community of Glencoe. Stonehill had paid for his nephew’s living expenses while he was studying in Europe.

The Stonehill house, a Louis XIII-style building inspired by the Château de Balleroy in Normandy, set the tone for what became a recognizable trait of Adler’s exemplary oeuvre. Symmetry guided the house’s entrance facade of pink brick, limestone trim, and offsetting tall windows and steeply pitched roof. Perched on a high bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, Adler’s first charge was one of the most outstanding country houses in Chicago. Unfortunately, the house, with its classically detailed interiors furnished in Mediterranean pieces, was razed during the early 1960s.

Among the most important houses executed by the AdlerDangler partnership was its first country house (1912), for Ralph H.Poole, in Lake Bluff, Illinois. With this commission, Adler brought the Loire valley to the Illinois prairie, designing a Louis XV-style château that perpetuated, with its symmetrical facade of low horizontal lines rising to a slate mansard roof, classical French architecture. Inside the house, a checker-floored entrance hall led to the principal rooms: living porch, library, living room, music room, and dining room, all arranged enfilade across the entire length of the house, another indication that Adler understood French design.

Henry Dangler’s death in 1917 left both a personal and a professional void in Adler’s life, for he had lost not only his partner but also his best friend. Adler was not certified to practice architecture in Illinois; he obtained a New York license in 1917. Although Adler was the designer, the signature on his plans had always been Dangler’s. Therefore, Adler was compelled to sit for the Illinois exam, and as presaged by his incomplete studies at the École, he failed. Adler had already built 17 houses, in French, Georgian, and Mediterranean styles, but he was forced to find another architect who could replace Dangler professionally. The solution came in another former associate from Shaw’s office, Robert Work. Their association, marking the second phase of Adler’s career, was strictly one of convenience.

While associated with Work, Adler applied the styles of his early houses but also added to his eclectic oeuvre early American, South African Dutch colonial, and a modernist design inspired by Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956). Of these three styles, it was the house in early American (1926) for William McCormick Blair in Lake Bluff that deviated from Adler’s usual approach to design. The irregular massing of colonial architecture, whereby a house grows larger over time, dictated the asymmetrical design for the Blairs. Although the house was built all at once, Adler’s adaptation flawlessly suggested an organic progression of growth from the principal block, shingled and gambrel roofed, to the appended wings.

Adler’s largest undertaking was also completed during the mid-1920s. Castle Hill, the imposing English manor house (1925) for Richard T.Crane Jr., in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with its pedimented entrance pavilion, balustraded hip roof, and crowning cupola, followed closely the architecture of 17th-century England, particularly the work of Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and the Wren-like Belton House (1689). Adler’s ability lay not only in his proficient design but also in his choice of small Holland brick with a soft pink patina that softened the imposing scale of the house, rising at the foot of a 160-foot-wide aisle of grass that undulated toward the Atlantic Ocean.

Adler built 16 houses during the second phase of his career, including a Louis XVI-style townhouse (1921) for Joseph and Annie Ryerson in Chicago. The Ryerson townhouse, a classically elegant building—with its symmetrical limestone facade, crowning mansard roof, and period detailing—was Adler’s only townhouse design in the French style (Adler built eight townhouses during his career).

By 1929, because Adler had practiced as a principal architect for ten years, he became eligible for Illinois’s oral examination, which he passed, therefore ending his 12-year association with Robert Work. Unfortunately, Adler’s professional achievement was marred by personal tragedy. In May 1930 Katherine (1893–1930), his wife of 14 years, was killed in an automobile accident while she and Adler were motoring on a rain-slick road in Normandy. Adler sustained only minor physical injuries, but he was extremely distraught.

Regardless of this setback, the late 1920s through the mid19308 resulted in the culmination of Adler’s career, starting with his masterpiece: the Cotswold-influenced house of Celia Tobin Clark in Hillsborough, California, called House-on-Hill (1930). Here, Adler created a house that, despite its underlying grandeur and nearly 400 acres of property, was inconspicuous and unpretentious. For example, because Adler nestled House-on-Hill into the hillside of its vast property, from the entrance forecourt it appeared to be only one-and-a-half stories. The house’s full magnitude became apparent only at the back, from the south terrace, where Adler’s most outstanding elevation—an Elizabethan half-timbered facade of oak and intricately patterned brick nogging—rose majestically, as if it grew from the landscape.

Inside the Clark house, a beamed and oak-paneled reception gallery, floored in a harlequin-patterned black-and-white marble tile, opened into the house’s principal stair hall. Here, a monumental and skillfully carved staircase gave the first indication of the opulence of House-on-Hill. Because the reception gallery was on the second floor, the staircase, with its substantial balustrade, led downstairs to an impressive procession of rooms: library, music room, and dining room. Warmth and comfort pervaded the library, whose antique pine paneling, Grinling Gibbon’s overmantel, and pegged parquetry were imported from Europe. In the commodious and imposing music room, classically detailed spruce walls served as foundation for a high plaster ceiling with its patterns of rosettes, garlands, and musical instruments, while in the dining room, panels of hand-painted 18th-century Chinese wallpaper were framed by exquisite woodwork in sugar pine.

Another outstanding design from this period was the Pennsylvania Dutch-style Georgian for Helen Shedd Reed (1931), unquestionably Adler’s finest house on the North Shore. The Reed house, consisting of a center block balanced by a pair of wings, was sited beyond a grass forecourt with a small pool and surrounding U-shaped gravel drive and exemplified the symmetry, balance, and elegance of Adler’s work. The house’s shimmering dark gray mica stone also added to its magnificence.

The interior of the Reed house was the most important collaboration between Adler and his sister, interior decorator Frances Elkins (1888–1953). Adler and Elkins were extremely close, and during his tenure in Paris, she traveled with him,  meeting several avant-garde artisans, including Jean-Michel Frank (1895–1941), the French interior decorator, and furniture designer, and Alberto Giacometti (1902–85), the sculptor who designed furniture for Frank. Nowhere is Elkins’s relationship with these designers more apparent than in the Reed house, where Adler’s skilled architecture guided the most notable interiors of her career. Elkins lived in California, and although she worked independently of her brother, they collaborated on at least 16 commissions, undoubtedly her best work, from 1919 until 1949, when Adler died unexpectedly of a heart attack.

 Freestanding staircase, Mrs. Kersey
Coates Reed House, by David Adler
(1931)

The Reed house’s interiors blended the traditional and the avant-garde, starting in the entrance hall, where a slick blackand-white marble floor led to the ladies’ powder room, the gentlemen’s cloakroom, and the gallery. In the gallery, stately black Belgian marble columns framed the crowning element of the interior: a dramatic, freestanding staircase of ebony and wrought-glass spindles. The gallery led to each of the principal rooms: living room, library, and dining room, all aligned overlooking Lake Michigan.

Adler gave each of these rooms his usual dose of exquisite and brilliantly executed detailing. In the living room and dining room, a dentiled cornice, as well as mantels and door casings, all intricately carved, complemented Elkins’s selection of English antiques and accoutrements, including the dining room’s hand painted Chinese wallpaper. In the library, although the most avant-garde room in the house, walls of tan Hermès goatskin and leather-upholstered furnishings by Frank were adroitly tempered by Adler’s traditional foundation: antique French parquetry, a finely carved fireplace mantel, and doors and casings, resulting in the perfectly balanced eclecticism for which he was renowned.

Any discussion of the Reed commission would be remiss without mentioning the tennis house that Adler designed several years before the main house. Located at the foot of the formal gardens, across the street from the main house, the Georgian building, with its central lounge, his-and-hers changing rooms, and second-floor bedrooms, was ingeniously sited at the edge of a ravine, allowing Adler to reduce the apparent scale of the mammoth building by positioning the court ten feet below ground level. The end result: a sunken indoor court where natural light flooded the space through a pitched glass roof, creating, along with interior ivy-covered walls, the illusion of an outdoor setting.

of, creating, along with interior ivy-covered walls, the illusion of an outdoor setting. The mid-1930s signaled the end to Adler’s career as an architect of the great house. Adler’s declining health from a riding accident in 1935, as well as altered economic conditions in the United States, prompted him to adapt to designing smaller, less grand houses and to spend more time executing apartment interiors and the alterations and additions that had always been a part of his demanding schedule.

Adler’s last house (he built 45 houses, 18 of which were located outside of the Chicago area), in Pebble Beach, California, was designed for Paul and Ruth Winslow (1948). Built low to the ground, one storied, and sided in flush boards painted white, the Winslow house consisted of a central living room balanced by two symmetrical wings: the dining room and service wing and the master bedroom wing. Despite the house’s modest size, Adler’s last house was one that exemplified his ability to create grandeur and elegance, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Charles A. Stonehill House, Chicago, Illinois, 1911

Ralph H.Poole House, Lake Bluff, Illinois (with Henry Dangler), 1912

Castle Hill, Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1925

William McCormick Blair House, Lake Bluff, Illinois (with Robert Work), 1926

House-on-Hill (Celia Tobin Clark House), Hillsborough, California, 1930

Helen Shedd Reed House, Lake Forest, Illinois (with Frances Elkins), 1931