Grand Tour De Force

A 1910s Mansion On Lake Michigan Gets A Magnificent Redo—Five Years In The Making—At The Hands Of Chicago Designer And Ed A-Lister Alessandra Branca.

- Nancy Hass

THE WIND WHIPS ACROSS CHICAGO’S Lake Shore Drive no matter the season. But within the 1910s mansion on Lake Michigan that decorator Alessandra Branca recently completed for a client after five years of construction, all is calm. Or more than just calm— serene. Under her guidance, the fourstory Georgian edifice has become a neoclassical refuge bathed in supersaturated color and rich textures—the perfect place for its owner, a manabout-town, to sip a Campari on a balmy June afternoon or nurse a cognac late into a December night. “You want to feel both wrapped in solitude and ready to go out into the world,” says Branca, who is based in the Windy City but was raised in Rome, a fact that is writ large on the project, with its mixture of references to Italy’s past and present. “You want to feel comforted and also energized.”

The house, which has been in the owner’s family for many years, has an Edith Wharton–esque majesty. Branca, who first came to Chicago for college (where she met her husband of 42 years, a native of the city, and decided to stay), has an international client roster, but she says it was “a profound gift” to work on a project within walking distance of her own elegant townhouse on Lake Michigan, especially one so architecturally significant. “So many grand homes here have been replaced by gleaming towers,” she says. “When you are able to bring into the present a house with such a past, it’s an enlivening experience.”