Joseph Medill hired architect Charles A. Coolidge to design a Beaux-Arts style home with a white clapboard exterior and an imposing classical portico for the front facade. The Beaux-Arts style of architecture is characterized by symmetry and classical design. The term Beaux-Arts comes from an architectural school in France, called the Ecole Des Beaux Arts.  Many American architects, including those in the Coolidge firm, studied at this school in France.

Medill’s house cost $15,000 to build in 1896.  Coolidge’s other important designs in Chicago include the Art Institute of Chicago and the former Chicago Public Library, which is now the Chicago Cultural Center. Medill called his country retreat Red Oaks Farm as a tribute to the 300 year-old oak trees that still grow on the estate.

Joseph Medill may have used the central room on the second floor as his bedroom. Katherine Medill McCormick, Robert Sanderson McCormick and other family members may have used the other bedrooms on the second floor.   Robert Rutherford McCormick and his older brother Medill used the end rooms in the attic as their bedrooms.  The Victorian-era kitchen and the servants’ quarters were located in the basement.

During this era, the house was heated with coal burned on grates inside the fireplaces.  Lighting consisted of candles, oil and kerosene lamps.  Summer heat was vented through a ceiling window in the attic, and the second floor rooms had louvered doors to allow breezes to waft through and to afford privacy for those inside the bedrooms.  Because of these conditions, the house was only occupied during the summer and fall seasons.

Up until the 1935 expansion, this Medill-era home measured 72 feet 8 inches across from east to west and 35 feet 6 inches wide from north to south.

The house was electrified in 1909, so the wall scones and lamps used electric bulbs.  The house was still heated with coal, but instead of using grates in the fireplaces, the McCormicks installed two coal stokers in the basement.  On the east wall of the interior of the west porch, one can see the small door through which the coal was dumped into the basement.

McCormick began construction of a swimming pool, just outside the east portico, in August of 1919.  The pool cost $3,500 to construct.  A telephone was added to the home in 1928.  The McCormicks used the Illinois Bell Company to provide them with their telephone service.

By 1938, Willis Irvin completed the additions of an east and a west wing, which flanked Coolidge’s central section of the house.   The west wall of the dining room represents where the Coolidge-design ends and the Irwin expansion begins.  The east wall of the drawing room represents where the Coolidge-design ends and the Irwin expansion begins.  Steel pocket fire doors in the basement as well as on the first floor mark the line between the Coolidge design and the Irwin expansion.

The new dimensions of the expanded house measured 195 feet, 6 inches across from east to west and 35 feet, 6 inches wide from north to south.   The east wing measured 60 feet from north to south, and the west wing measured 63 feet from north to south.

In 1936, the McCormicks changed their heating system from the coal stokers to an oil burner in the basement.  The oil burners heated hot water that circulated through radiators throughout the home.  Some standing radiators are still visible on the second floor, but many of the other rooms have radiators built into the walls just below the window sills.  Air conditioning was added to the home in the in 1938.

The basement level of the west wing became a modern kitchen wing with a servants’ sitting room, servants’ dining room and a servants’ porch.  The first floor of the west wing became the private bedroom areas for the McCormicks.  Despite the fact that Irwin built a bedroom suite for Amy on the first floor of the west wing, Amy McCormick decided to keep her bedroom on the second floor.  When Robert McCormick remarried in 1944, the second Mrs. McCormick (Maryland) used rooms on the first floor of the west wing as her bedroom suite.   The third floor of the west wing became the new bedrooms and bathrooms for the servants.