Dennis Blair House

Route 1, Stop 3

Description by Conor Libit

Address: 249 Kimberly Road, North Barrington

Architect: Dennis Blair 

4 Bedrooms, 3 Bathrooms 

Built: 1967

Dennis Blair is another student of Frank Lloyd Wright having studied under him at Taliesen. Bair worked with Wright on the design of the Gugenheim museum in New York. This is a geometrically simple home with the main structure being two rectangular boxes offset from each other. The detached garage was, at some point, joined to the main house by a multipurpose room. You can see the original covered concrete walkway that joined them. The first box containing the private areas, bedrooms and bathrooms, has a classically flat roof and a central hallway with low exposed wooden ceilings. To the west are the common areas of the house, the kitchen, dining, and family rooms. This side of the house is seemingly elevated due to a hill which leads down to a small creek. The middle area of this common box has a tall vaulted ceiling with the gables on each end filled entirely by windows. The living room and dining rooms areas are flooded by light because of these gables and by way of the entire western wall being pierced by windows and glass doors. These doors lead out onto a 40 foot porch that is nestled in by the property’s mature trees giving the entire house a secluded and natural feeling. On the lower floor are additional living spaces they also open to the outdoors and the creek which runs through the property. 

Can't Miss: 

• The 40’ wall of glass and enclosed porch that bring nature into the house.

• The unique and large gable windows. 

Dennis Blair Bio

By Barbara L. Benson

enis Blair was born in 1921 and studied at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West School and Studio. He was chosen by Wright to assist in his work on New York’s Guggenheim Museum 1944-45. He began a professional career with residential commissions but became noted for his design of Adlai Stevenson High School in Libertyville, Illinois.                                                                                                                            

In the early 1950s he was recognized as an “architect to watch” by Architectural Record magazine for his work at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio. Harry Weese was also on that list. But through the ensuing decades it was his simple and elegant residential designs, especially for clients in the north and northwest suburbs would for the most part be treasured and where necessary authentically preserved.

He became a resident of Long Grove, where an enclave of his designs would be the focus of a Bauhaus tour in 2010, which at 89, he attended to answer questions of visitors. 

By the early 1970s, he was living with his family in Lake Forest, but had already purchased the Lot at at105 West Hillside Avenue in the Village of Barrington where he built his own Atrium House and studio.  It was a unique location on the southwest corner of the hillside, one of the highest sites in Barrington. Opposite, across Hough Street, the Water Tower was the focal point around which there was a Harry Weese enclave.

From the Atrium House and studio in Barrington, Blair continued his modernist residential design,  and with the advantage of mostly larger lots, slipping easily into the streetscape between the traditional designs and historic buildings that were the hallmark of Barrington’s architectural history.

Blair lived there until the early 2000s, when ill-health saw him move to an assisted living facility, He died in 2015.  New owners of The Atrium House have done a sensitive and beautiful restoration.