NY Times
At Home With the Wildlife of Industrial Chicago

When the couple moved to the area 20 years ago, it was still “very transitional.” Their neighbors included a coffee-roasting plant and metal-plating companies. The concrete-block house was an industrial structure, too, designed in 1983 by the modernist architect Harry Weese in collaboration with his daughter Marcia Weese and her husband, Dan Yarbrough, a sculptor, for use as an artist’s studio. The Arnetts slowly transformed the property into a warm family home, most recently with a new addition. Hawks, flicker woodpeckers, rabbits and other wildlife inhabit the property, a third of an acre. “It’s a sort of urban oasis,” Arnett says.

“We did not aspire to live in a stark, modernist house,” Arnett says. “Art is the thread between the new space and the old.”