Pleasant Home, Prairie School museum in Oak Park, Illinois.
Pleasant Home is a 30-room Prairie School house in Oak Park, Illinois, designed by architect George W. Maher. It features custom woodwork, art glass windows, and an enclosed circular porch that together form one of the most complete examples of this style in the region.
Banker John W. Farson commissioned George W. Maher to design this house in 1897, and it was completed shortly after. Over the following decades the building changed hands several times before being recognized as a National Historic Landmark and opened to the public.
Oak Park draws visitors interested in early American residential design, and this house sits at the center of that story as a lived-in example of Prairie School thinking. The art glass windows and the enclosed circular porch show how the architect brought the outdoors into everyday domestic life.
The house is in Oak Park, a suburb west of Chicago that is easy to reach by train. Once inside, visitors should follow staff directions closely because the rooms and their original furnishings are in a fragile historic state.
George W. Maher designed a considerable number of houses across the region, but Pleasant Home is the only one that functions as a public museum. This means it is the only place where visitors can experience his work from the inside, with the original furnishings and details he designed still in place.
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