Glessner House, located in Chicago’s Prairie Avenue Historic District, is a fully restored house museum and a National Historic Landmark. Designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson and completed in 1887, the innovative house was not well received by its neighbors, who called it the fortress or the jail, but was praised by architects including Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

John and Frances Glessner, the builders of the house, found Richardson to share the progressive ideas they had for their home, resulting in a perfect architect-client relationship. Richardson noted that of all the houses he ever designed, this was one in which he would have chosen to live. The house was furnished with wallpapers, textiles, and rugs by William Morris, as well as handcrafted furniture and decorative objects which gave it a distinctly different appearance from its Gilded Age counterparts.

The Glessners occupied the house for nearly fifty years, until their deaths in the 1930s. Prairie Avenue was the most exclusive residential street in Chicago at the time, and their neighbors included Marshall Field and George Pullman and many others. After three decades of use by a school and a printing research foundation, the house was put up for sale and threatened with demolition. Architect Philip Johnson championed its preservation, referring to it as “the most important house in the country to me.”

The house was purchased in 1966, and since that time millions have been put into its restoration. The Glessner family has returned most of the original furnishings and an astonishing archive of other materials, including the personal papers of daughter Frances Glessner Lee, creator of the famous “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” and regarded as the mother of forensic science.

Today, Glessner House provides visitors with a rare opportunity to step back into Chicago’s Gilded Age, experiencing one family’s distinctive home exactly as it appeared, with original furniture and decorative arts, and Morris wallpapers, textiles, and rugs painstakingly reproduced.

The house offers tours and a variety of in-person and online programs that explore architecture, history, and design in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.