Photos: Exploring An Awesome, Literal Glass House Just Outside Chicago

By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 19, 2016 7:15PM

A midcentury modern glass home in Olympia Fields, just south of Chicago (photo via Houzz)

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and we’ve finally found out who at least two of those oft-discussed people are: Kim and Jeff Valles, owners of the Chicago area home above, which is not unlike a fishbowl for humans.

As the two packed up their mid-century modern palace to move to the Pacific Northwest, they talked to the design website Houzz.

“This house is all about openness,” Jeff said, and he was totally on the money, as you can see in the video home tour below.

Located in Olympia Fields, about 30 miles south of Chicago, the couple’s home was designed and built by architect H.P. Davis Rockwell in 1964, Houzz reports. (The Valles are the first people, besides Rockwell himself, to live in it.)

Rockwell studied under Mies van der Rohe, a fact that will surprise no one who compares this house to van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois.

Though the house has architectural importance, it's also a pleasant place to live day-to-day. It has a hidden, below-ground basement level as big as the upper level, which offers some actual privacy—and it doesn't hurt that the Valles updated the heating and cooling systems.

“When it gets around zero [degrees] and below, I cover up with my blanket and I read my book, and outside it’s all white and it’s snowing and I’m still warm and cozy,” Kim told Houzz. “It’s just an amazing experience.”

Kim says the experience of living inside the house changes your relationship with the world outside the house.

“It forces you be more aware of what’s going on around you,” she told Houzz. “You cannot close yourself off to the outside, or even to other people.”