Twenty years after finishing their dream home, Peter and Robin Baugher are at it again.
The Baughers were the subjects of a mini Wilmette scandal in 1982 when they paid the then princely sum of $250,000 for a little house on Sheridan Road. Nobody could figure out why anybody would pay so dearly for a musty old house with a nasty draft and no air conditioning.
“My dad saw the lot and said if we didn’t buy it, he would,” says Robin.
So the Baughers grinned through the whispers and dealt with the house’s quirks while they squirreled away cash to build a better insulated home with air conditioning and oriented to take advantage of the lot’s phenomenal Lake Michigan views.
“I was first man on the job, and it wasn’t easy,” confesses Robin. “There were times when I wanted to run.”
But they didn’t run, and in 1990, the Baughers finally moved into their newly constructed home. But now history may be repeating itself.
Last year, their next-door neighbor approached them about buying the house where he and his wife had spent their entire marriage and where his wife had lived since she was a child.
But there was a catch; the Baughers couldn’t tour the house until after they closed on the property. Concerned that somebody would buy the land and replace the small cottage with a poorly designed, out-of-scale home, they decided to make an offer.
While they’d planned to hire a crew to clear and demolish the property, the Baughers were shocked to find that their new house was full of furniture, garbage and documents. Robin couldn’t bring herself to trash everything without at least going through it, a process that took months.
“I hated the thought of throwing out something important,” says Robin.
And after months finding photos, letters and papers that chronicled her neighbor’s life since childhood, Robin began to feel connected to the property’s past—and its future.
So the Baughers decided to take a stab at developing it themselves using the latest in green and universal design principles, which ensure a building is accessible to everybody, including people with physical impairments.
“When you say this to people, they picture bars and low surfaces, but we can be creative in terms of the types of things we do and the materials we use,” says Robin.
In January, the Baughers teamed up with Josh Wood, who teaches architecture at New Trier High School to create a competition for his 32 architecture students.
In May, a panel of six professionals will choose a winner from the best of the ten finalists. While the winning design will need to be certified by professional engineers, Robin’s thrilled that student architects will learn important lessons about designing eco-friendly buildings accessible to everybody.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in such a house?” asks Robin.
Depending on the winning design, the Baughers just might find out.
To find out more about contest plans, see our article: A Project on Sheridan Road is a One-of-a-Kind Opportunity for Architecture Students.
