The elegant, formal Leverett Thompson house, on the northeast corner of Woodland Road and Lake Road, across from the lake shore, was designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw in 1907. Mrs. Thompson was the former Alice Poole and the Thompson place stands on land which orginally was part of the Poole estate, "Elsinore," across Lake Road on the bluff, built in 1884. According to the Preservation Foundation Guide (#10), "one of the first lake-front mansions in Lake Forest." The Poole house long ago gave way to David Adler's exquisite Keith-Stride house, but -- again the Guide tells us -- the 1907 Shaw house "is thought to" include an earlier Poole-estate outbuilding, making this one of the oldest surviving Lake Road structures. The interest in this address, though, goes beyond both the literary Poole family and the important Shaw house to the landscape work of a remarkable partnership employed here, Charles Platt and Rose Standish Nichols -- both of the Cornish, New Hampshire summer artists' community.

When the pre-war-founded Garden Club of America visited Lake Forest in 1919, that first post-war summer, their visit included the Thompson place. Chicago landscape gardener Ralph Rodney Root, an honorary member of the Lake Forest Garden Club, prepared a book of garden plans for the occasion, along with now-very-valuable attributions of architects, landscape gardeners, and sculptors. Root, from 1917 to 1919, taught a summer school of landscape architecture at Lake Forest University, in addition to his landscape practice. Earlier in the decade and through 1918 he had been professor of landscape gardening in the architecture school of the University of Illinois and had written Design in Landscape Gardening (New York: Century, 1914), from a formal viewpoint. It is to Root's 1919 plan that I owe the attribution of the garden and park at the Thompson place to Platt and Nichols.

Charles Platt's most notable work was his now demolished 1912 "Villa Turicum" here in Lake Forest for Harold and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, though most of his work was in the east. At "Villa Turicum," though, the scale of the resources available allowed him to recreate an Italian villa and garden, with much owed to Villa d'Este near Rome. In 1908, Platt won this rich commission from Frank Lloyd Wright -- sounding the death knell for, or at least signalling the eclipse of, the Prairie School. Wright left his family in Oak Park and went off to Europe with the wife of a client, leaving the field to the Beaux-Arts-trained architects like Platt and Shaw. The movement toward classicism and historicism had been taking shape for over a decade -- with English architect Reginald Blomfield's 1892 book, The Formal Garden in England (Shaw's 1892 copy still is on the inglenook shelf at Ragdale), with the classical structures and court of the 1892-3 World's Columbian Exposition here in Chicago, and with the appearance of two key American books: Platt's own 1894 Italian Gardens and Edith Wharton's 1904 Italian Villas and Their Gardens. Landscape historian Norman Newton (Design on the Land, 1972) credits the 1893 Chicago event and Platt's book, though, with marking the beginning of the Country Place era in this country. From his book, based on an Italian tour, Platt reached out beyond his own formal garden in Cornish to undertake many estate plans on the east coast.

The Bostonian Miss Rose Nichols, who Root credits with the planting for the estate with the formal garden west of the house, was the niece of another Cornish resident, the genteel sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens, at the zenith of his reputation around the turn of the century (a smaller copy of a very limited-edition of his Lincoln-Park standing-Lincoln statue can be seen at the Donnelley Library, Lake Forest College). Nichols often collaborated with Howard Shaw, and Mac Griswold in The Golden Age of American Gardens... (Abrams, 1991) calls attention to their work together -- like that of architect Edwin Lutyens and landscape gardener Gertrude Jekyll in England at that time. Sometimes Nichols did the planting only (as at the Thompson place), but often she collaborated on the design. She was a pioneer as a professional woman in her era and attended MIT, along with being a member of Society. The guest book for the Laflins' 1907 "Ellslloyd" a couple of blocks south of the Thompson place -- given to the Lake Forest College library in 1995 by Mrs. Stanley Field -- shows Miss Nichols visiting there on at least two occasions. Rose Nichols worked also on the Laflins' grounds and on the Ryersons' renown "Havenwood" garden now abandoned, though not yet built over, at the junction of Ringwood and Mayflower. Nichols wrote books into the 1920s on English, Italian, and Spanish/Portuguese gardens which nourished her coast-to coast practice (the guest book for the Laflins' Pasadena house shows her visiting there, as well).

Shaw's east-facing terrace for the Thompson house, visible from Lake Road, reflects his embracing of an architectural apporach to the terrain adjacent to the house as called for in Blomfield's 1892 manifesto. At that same time Shaw was designing striking English-garden terraces, too, for the Durand Commons at Lake Forest College and for Clifford Barnes's "Glen Rowan" just west of the campus across Sheridan Road. Gardeners like Nichols or Beatrix Ferrand in this country were teaming up with architects like Shaw and Delano & Aldrich (who Ferrand helped when they were starting out, prior to their 1923 design of "Fairlawn" here in Lake Forest) to seize the ground directly around the house back from the landscape practitioners, descended from the English school and influenced and led by Olmsted.

The serenely-designed, park-like vista to the lake from the terrace of the Italian-inspired neo-Georgian Thompson house remains today a testimony to a long-ago very genteel competition between garden styles (formal vs. landscape) and between emerging professions (architecture vs. landscape gardening or architecture). The Thompson place with its Shaw house and terrace, Platt estate design, and Nichols plantings may have played, too, a pivotal role in turning the tide, for a while, away from the innovations of Wright and the Prairie School through Platt's winning of the highly-important "Villa Turicum" commission. From 1907 to World War I (1917-18), Shaw himself would dominate the Lake Forest scene, going on to build not only the 1914 Ryersons' "Havenwood" (Guide, #56) again collaborating with Nichols, but also the 1912 Finley Barrell house on Rosemary (Guide, #50), this time collaborating with the renown Warren Manning on a formal garden. Neighboring the Thompson house, too, were Shaw's 1912 McLennan house (#8), his 1916 Misses Colvin house (#9), and his 1914 Clayton Mark house (#11). The exception proves the rule with architect William Carbys Zimmerman's 1908 Prairie-Style-featured Bernard Eckert house at 950 East Westminster (Guide #17): the rare and perhaps last major example of its type in Lake Forest. Shaw was the major pre-war architect-beneficiary of the outcome of this competition. The formal, historical style itself, as practiced particularly by men who worked in Shaw's office (Adler, Anderson, Milman), would hold sway in Lake Forest beyond Shaw's death in 1926 until after World War II, forty years after the Thompson estate was completed.

[In addition to the sources noted above, I'm endebted to Leonard K. Eaton's Two Chicago Architects and Their Clients (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1969) for its discussion of the Shaw-Wright dichotomy. George Ackerman, too, discusses the McCormick commission in his 1990 book entitled The Villa: Form and Ideology in the Country House. I'm also indebted to Deborah E. Van Buren for her article, "Landscape Architecture in the Cornish Colony: the Careers of Rose Nichols, Ellen Shipman, and Frances Duncan" in Women's Studies, v. 14 (1988), pp. 367-388. For Platt a recent monograph is available and his 1894 book on Italian gardens has been reprinted, as well. Finally, Root's 1919 book of local garden plans is available in the archives of the Lake Forest Garden Club, on deposit in the special collections unit of the Donnelley Library, Lake Forest College.]

Part of the Lake Forest Walking Tour Collection.
Arthur Miller
January 1, 1996