Rooms at the Top
Chicago Magazine , June 10, 2002
By Robert Sharoff
In the past five years, Lucien Lagrange has
established himself as the leading high-end residential architect in Chicago by returning
to the elegance of an earlier age. His spectacular multimillion-dollar apartments are monumental in scale and lavish in classic, pricey detailing.
The critics might not be convinced, but real
estate developers and the really rich are buying into his reinvented vision of luxury.
50 or so members of the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s auxiliary board are gathered this early spring evening in the conference room of Lagrange’s Michigan Avenue office. What gives this evening its particular charge is that instead of the usual slides of hotels, office buildings, and parks, the work on display is the kind of architecture this crowd experiences every day-high-end Gold Coast apartment buildings.
A sigh passes through the audience when
Lagrange, a courtly, silver-haired man with
a strong French accent, relates the story of
a penthouse in the Park Tower; a building that
many say redefined the luxury market in Chicago. He made three trips to France to find the right marble flooring.
Indeed, Lagrange, 61, is messianic on a subject generally more hotly debated in real estate circles than in the aesthetics-driven world of architecture—namely, what is luxury? How is it defined? “All the elegance we had at the turn of the century just disappeared in the sixties and seventies and eighties,” he says, sounding alternately mournful and a little offended. “Water Tower Place has eight-foot ceilings and layouts not much different from a CHA building. They tried to call that luxury. It’s almost like we forgot what luxury is.”
Not to worry, however. Because Lagrange
remembers and is ready to lead us out of the wilderness of white box apartments in soulless glass buildings and back to the promised land
of limestone façade, parquet floors, and 11-foot ceilings. “You have to put out of your mind modern architecture like Olympia Centre and Water Tower Place,” he says. “Go back to those beautiful buildings on East Lake Shore Drive. They are the starting point.”
In the past five years, Lucien Lagrange, a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill alum who founded his own firm in 1985, has turned out a series of luxury condominium buildings, many featuring the kind of Second Empire detailing he grew up with in his native France. These include the Park Tower at the corner of Chicago and Michigan Avenue and four buildings currently in varying stages of construction: 65 East Goethe Street, 840 North Lake Shore Drive, and the conversion of the Blackstone and the Ambassador West Hotels. The results have reinvigorated the formally moribund downtown luxury market and effectively negated reports that the conspicuous consumption of the nineties is on the wane.
In 1999, Lagrange’s largest residential commission to date, the Park Tower, sold out several years before the first of its 117 apartments were ready for occupancy. The prices averaged $400 per square foot. “I think it was some kind of a record,” says Nick Pritzker, the chairman and president of the Hyatt Development Corporation, a co-developer of the building along with
LR Development.
And that was only the beginning. 65 East Goethe, an eight-story limestone structure with a zinc mansard roof that at first glance looks as if it had been transported directly from Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, is 70 percent sold at prices ranging from $3 million to $5 million a unit, according to its developer, Christopher Carley of the Fordham Company. The rumored purchasers —at this level, no one confirms anything—include such potent corporate and social names as William Wrigley Jr., James Crown, and Paul Beitler. Lagrange says the appeal is easy to understand: “It’s the only building in town where you can buy a 12,000-square-foot apartment.”
Similarly, 840 North Lake Shore Drive, a much larger Second Empire building being developed by LR Development that will not be ready for occupancy for another 18 months, is also 70 percent sold. The Ambassador West sold 25 percent of its 32 units in a single afternoon last fall, according to its developer, the partnership of real estate executive Sean Conlon and developer Mark Hunt. Apartments in both projects start
at about $1.5 million and go much higher.
Lagrange is “the leading residential architect
in Chicago at the high end,” says James Kinney, the president of Rubloff Residential Properties. “He is to real estate what somebody like Victor Skrebneski is to photography—a name buyers recognize and other architects are starting
to emulate.”
What clients are buying is Lagrange’s carefully considered vision of what is and what is not luxury. When you step out of the elevator on the 66th floor of the Park Tower, you enter what is undoubtedly one of the most glamorous spaces in Chicago. A vestibule with curved walls and a marble floor leads to an enormous living room with 13 1/2-foot ceilings and elegant hand-sculpted plaster moldings. Looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows, one sees the tops of the towers and steeples, the cobalt blue lake, and—on clear days—the Michigan shoreline.
(The Park Tower is the tenth-tallest building in the city and among the 100 tallest in the world.)
“Luxury is not marble and brass,” Lagrange says. “It’s a way of life. You have to put yourself in the minds of different people who have different lifestyles. It’s something they don’t teach you
in architecture school.”
Not that he has anything against marble and brass—or limestone and mahogany, either. Most of his high-end projects use large quantities of those pricey materials. But the real key, says Lagrange, is the floor plan: “When you’re designing a floor plan, you don’t think about architecture. You think about getting up in the morning, taking a shower, using the sink. Or you think about entertaining and how you need space for a dinner party or a fundraising event.”
Lagrange loves what most modern architects would call wasted space—niches and galleries and anterooms and vestibules—along with curved walls, coved ceilings, and the kind of retro spaces, such as stone floored “orangeries,” that recall a much earlier era of gracious living. Other Lagrange revivals: enormous curved bay windows, elaborate moldings and columns,
and a tendency to label floor plans in French.
Ultimately, “what we want is a certain order,”
he says. “It doesn’t have to be classical, but classical has an order that is calming. I don’t really believe in feng shui, but feng shui is something I do everyday. It’s another way to create space that will bring peace and comfort.”
“He’s one of the most creative classic designers Chicago’s ever seen,” says Fordham’s Christopher Carley. “He earns every penny of his fee.”
Like many other architects, Lagrange is arriving on architecture’s main stage at a relatively advanced age. At 61, though, he is seemingly just entering his prime. His firm—Lucien Lagrange Architects—has doubled in size to 70 associates
in the past three years.
What is surprising about Lagrange is his late-blooming career change from designer of massive Skidmore-style mixed-use office and hotel complexes to residential traditionalist in love with the kind of historical details that would make his former colleagues break out in hives. Lagrange’s mentor at Skidmore was Bruce Graham, the legendary designer of the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Center, and dozens
of other skyscrapers.
Lagrange’s childhood was hardly auspicious. Born in 1940, the second son of a mason and a housewife, he spent his early years in a suburb of Paris. “We were in occupied France,” he says. “There was no food and a lot of bombing at night. We would hear the planes and go into the basement.” Especially harrowing is the memory of a walk his family took one Sunday afternoon when they were inadvertently caught in the crossfire between retreating German and advancing American troops. “The bullets were flying overhead, cutting down the telephone wires,” he remembers. “We crawled on our hands and knees to get home.”
“When he talks about his childhood,” says Howard McKee, a fellow Skidmore alumnus and one of his oldest friends, “he compares it to the simpler life of the Middle Ages. There were no highways, no cars. It was a very basic existence.”
In 1957, he dropped out of high school and moved to Montreal to live with his older brother. “I was just kind of a lost soul in those years,” he says.
He tried a number of odd jobs—working in a print shop, selling farming equipment—and eventually decided to go back to school to study architecture. After getting the Canadian equivalent of a GED, he enrolled at McGill University in Montreal in 1966. He also worked part-time as an architectural draftsman.
“I took a correspondence course in drafting,” he says. “It was a two-year course, but I locked myself in a room and completed it in three months.”
During the six-year McGill program, he had a number of summer internships at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s home office in Chicago, which was the beginning of what he says has been a 30-year love affair with the city. “Once I tasted Chicago,” he recalls, “I couldn’t stay away. I was so excited when I drove into town for my interview. Before I met with SOM in the afternoon, I took a walk in the loop to the Federal Center, the Monadnock, and the Inland Steel buildings. Everything was there.”
Lagrange was 32 when he graduated from McGill in 1972. He worked briefly for a planning firm and then returned to Skidmore, where for several years he alternated between the Chicago and the Montreal offices before finally moving to the Midwest for good in 1978.
Lagrange was undeniably successful, eventually rising to associate partner and supervising a number of high-profile projects, including One Financial Place and Onterie Center in Chicago and Citicorp Plaza in Los Angeles. “I did seven major buildings in six years,” he says. “By the end, I was one of the few designers there who actually had buildings under construction.”
In 1985, Lagrange, weary of the infighting and a punishing routine that kept him on airplanes several times a week, bolted and set up his own one-man firm. Gradually, the jobs came, the most notable of which was Plaza Escada across from the Water Tower Place and his first foray into the kind of Second Empire detailing that would become his trademark. The plan for the Plaza Escada began as a mixed-use high-rise topped by a 200-plus-room Park Hyatt Hotel. When that proved impossible to finance, it was downsized
to what was eventually built—a four-story cream—colored retail building.
Several years later, however, the Pritzkers—the owners of the Hyatt Corporation—decided to try again, this time by tearing down the existing Park Hyatt at the corner of Chicago and Michigan Avenues on the west side of Water Tower Square and erecting a new one that would also include a residential component and a limited amount of retail space. Although several architects were considered, Lagrange emerged the winner. The decision surprised many observers, who had expected the Pritzkers—the founders of the
Pritzker Prize, the architecture world’s Oscar—
to bring in a more famous name.
“National reputations aren’t everything,” says Nick Pritzker. “Every great architect starts with a local reputation, and we had worked with Lucien before and thought he had a very good flair for residential. He was an obvious choice.”
For Lagrange, it was the chance of a lifetime, and he responded accordingly. “Once you understand the site and the great urban space,” he explains, “you start dreaming.”
As for the apartments, Lagrange found an ally
in Bruce Abrams, the mercurial founder of
LR Development, who agreed to take on the condominium portion of the building. (Abrams has since died.) “He understood,” recalls Lagrange, using his ultimate accolade for a developer. “We talked the same language.
We both wanted to raise the bar of luxury.”
He pauses for a moment. “I can’t have a lifestyle like the 67th floor,” he says, referring to the Park Tower’s cloud-bumping top-floor penthouse.
“I can’t. But I can tell those people how they should live.”
