An American Palace: Chicago’s Samuel M. Nickerson House

I am happy to see the Nickerson house so beautifully restored. High quality restoration and serious stewardship come at a steep price. I am very impressed with how well the history was spelled out and at the level of scholarly research that was employed to ferret out which parts of the house were created by whom. As a zealous student of historic architecture, I relish finding beautiful, well-documented volumes like this to add to my architectural library.I have a small criticism. Many of the sepia-toned period room photos are reproduced in an awkwardly diminutive size with 2- to 3-inch borders of empty white space surrounding the photos. The publication of these original period rooms is for me one of the most important elements of the book. Some of them were enlarged later on in the book. I had to use a magnifying glass to see the details of the others. It is a shame to not use every square inch of a page to it fullest extent.Overall, it is a fantastic book that I would recommend to anyone interested in the history and restoration of high-end Victorian architecture.

... and anyone who enjoys old houses visiting Chicago should go and see it. The book does a great job of whetting one's appetite pre-visit or it makes an excellent gift to any lover of old magnificent homes. This one certainly is over-the-top, comparable in its splendor (though not its art collection) to Isabella Stuart Gardners fabulous home in Boston.

Beautiful book!

So stunned was I by the mansion/museum that I bought this book on site because I knew my photographs (yes, one can take them) would not begin to compare with those in the book. Not only are panoramic shots of rooms shown, but closeups of architectural details both before and after Driehaus' renovation are included, and all in color. Equally of interest are the black and white photographs of each room taken when the Nickersons and the second owner lived there.There is also good information about the mansion, its rooms and its four owners, albeit the section devoted to discussing the difficulty of determining who was responsible for various aspects of the interior decor was not of interest to me. Aware that there had been an earlier book about the mansion, I got  This House Was the Pride of the Town: Mr. Nickerson's Marble Palace Becomes Mr. Driehaus' Museum  through interlibrary loan in order to see if it had information that this one didn't have. It did and was of such interest to me that I photocopied pages that listed the things displayed in each room as well as pages that detailed the interesting gatherings that the Nickersons' hosted. I wouldn't recommend buying it, however, because the photographs are quite inferior to those in the new one.Because there is no See Inside feature for AN AMERICAN PALACE, in the first comment I've included links to ArtBeat Chicago's 5-min. video clip about the mansion/museum so that you can see some of the things you'll see in the book as well as to give you some information about it. It is said that Mr. Driehaus wanted to wow visitors to his mansion/museum, and that he's most certainly done. What makes it so stunning is the fact that "the curatorial approach of the museum avoids the traditionally cluttered appearance that defined interiors of the era, affording the visitor an opportunity to experience the rooms unencumbered by the trappings of wealth associated with the tastes of the time." So worth seeing is it that I've also included a link to the mansion/museum's website.

beautiful gilded age mansion