The House that APOTTERY BUILT

William Day Gates, founder of an important terra-cotta tile and pottery company, built his retirement home in 1927. Decades later, it would take a knowledgeable Arts & Crafts collector to save the abandoned house in Illinois. Chicago architect John Eifler helped guide the restoration: "The house is a terra cotta and pottery catalog!" he says.

- Regina Cole

"Although the house was a mess," says architect John Eifler, "the layout and many key elements were intact. The enormous window and several eyebrow windows remained. Much of the wood needed replacement, but original glass survived. We found boxes of tiles ...."

WHEN, IN 1927, William Day Gates built his retirement home, in Crystal Lake, about 50 miles northwest of Chicago, he aptly named it "Trails End." Gates, the founder and president of the American Terra Cotta & Ceramic Co., apparently used whatever materials were lying around at the factory. He lavishly applied tiles inside and out and even used packing materials in the structure of the house itself (see p. 57).

Gates' Illinois company made architectural terra cotta for more than 8,000 buildings in the United States and Canada, among them the so-called "jewel-box" banks designed by Louis Sullivan, Chicago's Carson Pirie Scott & Co. department store, buildings by Wright and by Purcell & Elmslie, and the Wrigley Building. His company also made Teco pottery.

It was therefore fitting that, after Trails End had stood uninhabited and neglected, the house was discovered, in 2008, by a passionate collector of Arts & Crafts furniture and pottery-especially Teco pottery.

"I first worked with Tim Pearson when he hired me to restore the 1911 Frank Lloyd Wright Balch House, in Oak Park," says Chicago-based architect John Eifler.

"Tim, the CFO of a big construction firm, had a huge Teco collection. He was one of the few people who saw this house's value. It was in very rough shape by the time he found it."

"It was being sold as a tear-down," says Julie Pearson. "Tim couldn't get a mortgage because the house had no heat, no electricity; it was uninhabitable."