It was while she was training for her first marathon that Brenda Harter found the second one.
On a training run in Naperville when she was getting ready to run her first Chicago Marathon at age 60, Harter passed by a pretty parcel of land for sale across the road from Egerman Woods Forest Preserve. With her husband, Tom, Harter had recently decided to build a new house instead of remodeling their home of more than 20 years, recalling that she thought “‘if we’re going to build, this would be the place to do it.’”
Running the first marathon took Harter a few hours. The second, designing and building a 19,000-square-foot house with indoor and outdoor pools, took more than four and a half years. An interior designer, Harter worked with Bruce George at Charles Vincent George Architects to create something that she felt would “fit in Europe,” she said, a turreted brick and stone manor with a formal presence but a warm, relaxing atmosphere.
The seven-bedroom house on Shamrock Court, completed in mid-2017, has a great room with a 30-foot ceiling, details in wrought iron, leaded glass and cut stone made by local experts in their crafts and an entertainment level that includes wine tasting room, billiards room and a movie theater. Harter hand-picked chandeliers, wood panels and even the slates that tile the home’s vast roof.
The Harters are both retired—Tom Harter sold a company he started and now is an investor—and their children and grandchildren live in other parts of the country. They plan to move permanently to their home in Florida, after living in Naperville since 1979. They’ll put the Shamrock Court mansion and its 2.5-acre grounds on the market January 6, asking $10.5 million. It’s represented by @propeties agent Michael LaFido, of the Marketing Luxury Group.
In June, another of LaFido’s listings sold for $4.75 million, the highest home price in Naperville since 2008. A difference with the Harters’ property is the location: the home is set amid several other multi million-dollar homes and is closer to the town’s usually busy downtown.
The house forms a loose U around the swimming pool and terrace area. A waterfall spills into the pool at one end, and at the other is a pool house with changing rooms, showers and laundry. To the right is a covered terrace with a complete kitchen and a dining table.
Those amenities were good to have in the normal times that preceded COVID, but since the onset of the virus and shutdowns, they’ve proven to be even more valuable for safe, socially distant entertaining.
Extensive plantings of trees and shrubs give this central part of the grounds a sense of enclosure, but just beyond them is a broad swath of lawn fit for larger parties and sports.
Brenda Harter made a strategic choice to have the home’s foyer greet visitors with a relatively modest layout rather than with a grand staircase—or worse, a grand double staircase. The idea was “to make people feel welcome and warm,” Harter said, “not to be all stairs.”
The concealed staircase leads up to a catwalk that overlooks the great room, where the ceiling is 30 feet high.
The floor is Jerusalem limestone and the wrought iron used on the front doors and the stairs is custom-built for the house. The same artisans made a gracious archway that tops the entrance to the home’s formal motor court, an arrangement of a garage, coach house and sheltered passageway that is one of the home’s most mannered nods to European country estates.
In the home the Harters built in the 1980s, the ceilings were uniformly eight feet high. That, their architect said, would limit their ability to remodel it into the voluminous spaces they wanted. Thus they ended up building anew, but in the formal dining room of the new home, Harter kept to eight-foot ceilings, for a sense of intimacy.
This great room is where the ceiling reaches 30 feet in height. Wide plank wood floors and the walkway overlook contribute to Harter’s modern take on old-time country homes. She used roll-away wood doors to make hiding the television and media storage bins convenient.
The great room also has a fireplace, with a stone chimney that rises the full 30 feet of the wall. It’s flanked by arched doorways onto the stone terrace, which feature more decorative wrought iron and provide a comfortable flow between indoor and outdoor spaces.
Outside, there’s another fireplace and seating area. It’s both an outdoor counterpart to the great room and, in the time of COVID, a comfortable place for social distancing.
The mix of shapes and exterior materials—brick, stone, slate, stucco—provides “texture and dimensionality” to keep it always interesting, Harter said.
The kitchen is large and opens into several surrounding spaces, but Harter said she studiously avoided “making it too open,” so that it would remain an inviting place where party guests like to congregate.
There’s much more cabinetry and a prep kitchen concealed behind the walls, which accommodated the caterers and chefs who’ve worked at the fundraising events the Harters hosted before the shutdowns.
Set inside a turret, the breakfast room is wrapped with windows. Most of the main-floor rooms have south-facing windows, which not only afford views of the pool and landscape, but also fill the rooms with sunshine and warmth.
The wood panel on the ceiling is part of a motif Harter used in several rooms to suggest the hefty wood trim of an older home without darkening the room too much.
The bedroom suite in the above photo is on the ground floor, with doors out to the pool area. It’s one of three contenders in the house to be the primary bedroom suite. The others are on the second floor. In all, the house has seven bedrooms.
The rathskeller-style wine-tasting room in the basement is part of “our entertainment floor,” as Harter calls it. Among the other offerings on this level are a billiards room, a pub, a movie theater that seats 18, and an endless-current lap pool.
A wine cellar on the other side of an arched window covering one end of the pool can accommodate several hundred bottles and is trimmed with the same stone and with wrought iron.
From beneath the covered dining terrace, the view takes in the pool, the several levels of outdoor space and the many lines and textures of the home.
The couple paid $1 million for the 2.5-acre site. Brenda Harter declined to say what they spent to build the house, pool and landscaping.
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