LFLB History Museum

Drive to the house. Image source: Juliet Stein-Davies.

Address: 700 Arbor Drive, Lake Bluff

Year built: 1931

Architect: David Adler

Original owners: Lester and Leola Stanton Armour

Lester Armour was the grandson of meatpacking tycoon Philip Danforth Armour. He left the family business to go into banking, eventually becoming president of The Chicago National Bank and Chairman of the Board of Harris Bank.

Lester Armour (1895-1970) and Leola Stanton Armour (1891-1980).

Leola Armour and David Adler were friends. She and her husband entrusted Adler to design for them a big house with a wing for servants and a wing for guests. The Armours raised their five children in the 46-room house which sits on a bluff with expansive views of Lake Michigan.

Image source: Juliet Stein-Davies.

Leola Armour traveled to Europe with David Adler and his sister, interior designer Frances Elkins, to choose furnishings and decorative elements for the house. The Armour house is one of the siblings’ few collaborations, the other being the Mrs. Kersey Coates Reed house in Lake Forest. Adler’s design for the Armour house was heavily influenced by Colonial and Federal styles.

Entry vestibule. Image Source: Ezra Stoller @ Esto.

Entry Hall looking out the front door of the Lester and Leola Armour house. Image Source: Courtesy of Robert and Leola A. Macdonald.

The round entry vestibule was decorated with traditional eagle-based consoles, a compass rose inlaid marble floor and plaster palms inspired by Elkins love of Giacometti. The entry hall has Federal-style detail that Elkins complimented with a wallpaper frieze and hand-painted palm fronds. The pine paneling in the library came from a European room.

English pine library. Image Source: Courtesy of Robert and Leola A. Macdonald.

Leola Armour’s art-deco inspired dressing room boasted magnificent mirrored panels molding and marble. (This iconic room was later removed, pieced together and is now a focal-point in New York interior designer Miles Redd’s townhouse.)

Aleka Armour in her mirrored dressing room and bath. Image Source: Courtesy of Mary Lloyd Estrin; featured in her book “To the Manor Born.”

The mirrored bath installed in Miles Redd’s New York townhouse. Image Source: The Big Book of Chic by Miles Redd, Assouline.

The Armours divorced and Lester Armour stayed in the house. In 1949, he married Alexandra Galitzine, “Aleka,” a Russian princess. She lived in the house following her husband’s death in 1970. A few years later the original 73-acre estate was subdivided.

Alexandria Galitzine “Aleka” Romanoff (1905-2006).

The house was rented out for the Robert Altman movie A Wedding, in 1977. Singer Richard Marx and his wife Cynthia Rhodes bought the house in 1997.

The cast of “A Wedding” in front of the Lester and Leola Armour house. Image Source: Courtesy of Lion’s Gate Films, Inc.

Cynthia Rhodes and Richard Marx, the third owners of Lester and Leola Armour’s house.

Glamour on the Lakefront: the Lester Armour House