Chicago's New Gem

Cupid and Psyche (c. 1900) is among the works in the Driehaus Museum's glass-domed sculpture gallery.

William Zbaren

Samuel Mayo Nickerson, a Chicago banker, spared no expense in the 1880s when he built a Neo-Renaissance, buff-colored sandstone mansion on a downtown corner lot. His architects, Burling and Whitehouse, created an austere exterior but lined the walls of the rooms with a flamboyant variety of marbles, alabaster and onyx. The workmen installed patterned stained-glass windows and parquet floors featuring foliage, checkerboards and overlapping circles, and Nickerson commissioned much of the carved furniture from Herter Brothers, the posh New York cabinetmakers. Although subsequent tenants converted the building for use as offices and art galleries, they scarcely changed the interior. And next month, plusher than ever, the twenty-room house officially opens to the public for tours as the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, a place in which its new owner makes the decorative arts of the 1880s to the early 1900s feel like a fresh aesthetic

Richard Driehaus (pronounced DREE-house), head of an eponymous Chicago investment firm that manages some $4 billion in private and institutional funds, bought the building in 2002. He immediately began transforming it into a museum, incorporating his own collection of Tiffany glass and lighting and Victorian paintings and sculpture, which he has been amassing for thirty years. Driehaus is also an ardent antimodernist — he gives a $200,000 prize each year to an influential classical architect — and the Nickerson rooms further his mission of enlightening the public about the varied lively strains of classical design throughout history. "He calls this his gift to the city," explains M. Kirby Talley Jr., the museum's founding executive director.

Talley, previously a cultural-heritage policymaker for the Dutch government, supervised up to a hundred craftspeople at a time in the Nickerson house, who were busy hand buffing the luxurious surfaces while concealing new mechanical systems. He also served as the project's interior designer and had a candy store of antiques to choose from, not only in Driehaus's warehouses and offices but also at the mansion itself, where twenty pieces of original furniture survived. Talley installed Tiffany chandeliers and lamps dripping with pearly seashells and glass jewels, and he covered the walls with damasks and velvets, as well as paintings by underappreciated artists such as Agnes Northrop (a prolific designer in Louis Comfort Tiffany's studio).

As Driehaus says, "I'm delighted to be able to bring the public into period-room environments filled with these beautifully crafted, classically inspired, yet endlessly inventive objects." Talley is careful to emphasize, though, that this isn't meant to be a house museum. "We didn't set out to replicate how the Nickersons lived, but rather we've created a gallery of very high-quality objects appropriate to the 1880s." 40 East Erie Street; 312-932-8665; driehausmuseum.org.

AUGUST 2008 MUST-SEES

• In "Sand: Memory, Meaning and Metaphor," the ubiquitous granules transcend the beach to become the stuff of artistic inspiration at the Parrish Art Museum, in Southampton, New York, through September 14. parrishart.org.
• They're worth a thousand words — original prints captured by Hollywood's most important Golden Age photographers brighten the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in the show "Made in Hollywood: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation," through October 12. sbma.net.
• In New York the Mostly Mozart Festival packs sixty classical-music events into Lincoln Center through the 23rd. lincolncenter.org.
• Bountiful Bernini: The artist's first major North American show ever, "Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture," graces L.A.'s J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from the 5th through October 26. getty.edu.
• Italy's legendary city of canals becomes a city of film from the 27th through September 6, during the sixty-fifth Venice International Film Festival, part of the Venice Biennale. labiennale.org.
• From the 25th through September 1, more than 48,000 people are expected to converge upon Black Rock City, a temporary community in the Nevadan Black Rock Desert, for Burning Man, an arts festival encouraging the exchange of new-age ideas about community and self-expression. burningman.com.
  LISTINGS BY LINDSAY CROUSE