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
Entries A–F 25
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 XVstyle
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.
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 26
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 XVIstyle
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.
House-on-Hill (Celia Tobin Clark
House), Hillsborough, California,
designed by David Adler (1930)
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 18thcentury
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.
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.
Entries A–F 29
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.
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.
Selected Works
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
