Design 3 Seriously Cool North Shore Home Offices

An office in your home can be so much more than just a space to answer emails and file papers.

It’s a room that can express your personality, taste and accomplishments. Here’s how three North Shore homeowners transformed their offices into spaces uniquely suited for them.

Creating a Brand

Cheryl Berman is CEO and Chief Creative Officer ofUnbundled, which helps clients like American Greetings, Arbonne and Joffrey Ballet creatively brand their identities and products. Her work is creative, collaborative and even musical, and her Wilmette home office reflects that with space for client meetings, a keyboard for composition and a desk that looks out over the trees to Lake Michigan.

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“We turned this into my office in 2007 when I left Leo Burnett,” says Berman as we toured the third-floor office. As Chairman of Leo Burnett USA, she brought in clients including McDonalds, Disney and Kraft, and she still serves on its Board of Directors. Berman worked with a painter on the wall color and finish to unite the space’s angles and ceiling heights.

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The space under the eaves, which might otherwise be wasted, was turned into built-in file storage and shelves to hold her awards and mementos of favorite campaigns.

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In addition to her office, the home, which she shares with her husband Randy Kretchmar, has a beach house where she holds client brainstorming sessions. But this colorful space is where Berman goes when she needs to get work done. “It’s good to have a space that reminds you that you’re good at something.”

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Wooden Refuge

When Cyndee Keiser and Fred Wall moved into their stately Georgian Colonial 13 years ago, they knew the Evanston home needed work, but loved the home’s high ceilings and symmetrical, large rooms. A realtor with Coldwell Banker, Keiser admits that they didn’t anticipate the renovations would take 11 years, but she says, “It was a case of the might-as-wells…”

A priority was an office off the formal living room. Keiser describes the original room as having white walls, awful windows and particleboard shelves. “Really, it was like being in an aquarium.” The couple put it on the list, and when their carpenter Jeff Jokela finished the family room, he started on Wall’s office.

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Jokela picked out mahogany for the woodwork and, working with the couple, designed a whole new room. He rebuilt the windows, custom milled all the wood for the ceiling, trim and walls, and rebuilt the cabinetry to make a space masculine enough for Wall, but special enough to be visible from the living room.

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And the pheasant? Wall bought that for Keiser because she uses pheasant feathers throughout their home in dried floral arrangements. It’s a nice combination of their two interests in a home that they’ve made—with Jokela’s help—all their own.

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Power Couple

For the past 27 years, when Catherine and Bart Rocca have needed to hash something out, or just sort the mail, they retreat to their partner desk in the library of their Victorian home in Evanston.

“I can’t tell you how many problems we’ve solved sitting across from each other,” Catherine says. They found the partner desk many years ago at an antique store in Winnetka, and realized it was perfect for the space and for their needs. The home, originally built in the 1870s, was “modernized,” which she says in quotes, sometime in the 1920s.

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“There was some remodeling to take it from being so Victorian to a little more Tudor,” she says. When they moved in, they updated some more, removing heavy drapes and adding in furnishings collected as they’ve traveled around the world.

The couple has purposely kept the office as a place to read and talk, versus a place to answer emails. “We both have computers, but we keep them on the second floor,” she says. “This is where we conduct our family business.”

The office décor reflects the family’s international roots and interests. With two grown children who live with their young families in Italy, another daughter in California, and a son in Evanston, the couple travels frequently. Their artwork includes Australian Ironwood bird carvings, Navajo folk art and an original photograph of President John F. Kennedy taken by Bart’s college roommate at a Harvard-Princeton football game.

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The bookcases are filled, as the couple loves to read, but the library and comfortable side chairs mean this room isn’t off limits to family. Children and grandchildren alike enjoy the comfy space to read and talk. But the desk, Catherine admits, is pretty much their space. “It pulls us in face-to-face,” she says.

 

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