Ralph Lauren meets Tom Ford inside this sleek and sophisticated Chicago house, which cost $1.8 million to build
4 min
If Kelli and Fei Wang’s house had a soul, it would be the walk-in closet.
The house, in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighbourhood, is designed around the couple’s love for fashion and includes a 300-square-foot custom closet, with charcoal-suede wall covering and cerused-oak shelves, amplified by a vanity within a 40 x 60 inch mirror. There is a separate accessories side room, modelled after a showroom, where Kelli’s collection of designer bags and shoes sit on shelves and where she hangs out on a silver love seat.
In the couple’s previous home in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, they had to change out their wardrobes every season, hauling clothes from their apartment to their storage unit in the building’s basement, because there wasn’t room for it all upstairs.
“I wanted to never do a closet swap again,” says Kelli, 42, dressed in a floaty, cream-coloured shirt dress from Sandro Paris and light pink Manolo Blahnik pumps. “The closet was the first thing I thought about for the house.”
The Wangs bought their Ukrainian Village property for $511,000 in 2016 and tore down the existing 2,500-square-foot, three-bedroom, old brick home on it. The new house, finished in 2021, is 5,000 square feet, has three bedrooms and cost $1.8 million, with about $100,000 of millwork, carpet and furnishings going into the primary closet alone.
To design the house, the couple hired Dan Mazzarini, the principal of New York-based BHDM Design, who was a director of store design at Ralph Lauren for six years and also worked on Michael Kors, Calvin Klein and Kate Spade retail spaces.
Mazzarini knew Kelli from college, and understood the couple’s love for fashion: they’d shopped together many times in New York, where Fei had a special affinity for the Ralph Lauren store on Madison Avenue.
“I wanted to live in the Ralph Lauren store,” says Fei, 46, dressed in a custom-made Pini Parma shirt and a Boggi sweater. “It makes you feel elegant, elevated, and classy.”
As a guide for the house’s overall aesthetic, they decided on “Ralph Lauren meets Tom Ford, a mixture of buttoned up and timeless sophistication and sexy, modern, crisp elegance,” says Mazzarini. That meant a lot of black, white and charcoal.
That mixture can be seen throughout the house. In the living room, open from the kitchen on the main floor, a Ralph Lauren influence can be seen in the classic white sofa, while the angles of the coffee table and the chairs are more Tom Ford, says Mazzarini.
Tom Ford comes out in the kitchen, where the black granite counters, black-matte open shelves and stainless-steel appliances have a “refined industrialism,” says Mazzarini. The dining room has a crafty Ralph Lauren chandelier and white leather chairs.
On the second floor, Fei’s office is “menswear-oriented” It has a modern, crisp, geometric style, with a glass coffee table, an oversize black linen sofa, and dark grey flannel curtains, like a suit, says Mazzarini. The red fox fur and brown velvet pillows, the rosewood desk and the nubby rug add more classic textures.
The primary suite, with its bathroom and the centrepiece closet, takes up the entire third floor. It is designed in part after the Bulgari Hotel Milano, where the couple stayed on one of their first trips to Italy. The furnishings include grey-velvet drapes, an ebony headboard, a leather bench and a large brown-velvet armchair.
When designing the closet, Mazzarini says he asked the couple how many suits, shoes, bags and accessories they had—and that number kept growing as the home-building process progressed, going from around 50 to more than 100 pairs of shoes for each. While the overarching goal was beauty and style, it also had to be comfortable—and to reflect what Mazzarini calls the couple’s “Midwestern warmth and hospitality.”
Fei was born in Shanghai and grew up in Chicago, where his father was getting a Ph.D. in chemistry. Living on a teacher assistant’s budget didn’t leave much for buying designer clothes, but Fei says he “always had an eye for fashion—it was innate.” He says his parents, who grew up when many Chinese people wore blue worker’s suits, weren’t interested in subsidising his passion, so he started working in a clothing store when he was 14 years old. The first suit he bought himself was from Banana Republic.
He graduated from Illinois State University in 1999 and then from the University of Chicago with an M.B.A. in 2004. He went to work in asset management at Morgan Stanley, then to J.P. Morgan Asset Management and UBS before landing again at Morgan Stanley in 2021, where he is now a senior vice president in family wealth management.
Kelli also remembers a passion for fashion from a young age. Growing up in Piqua, Ohio, north of Dayton, she couldn’t afford to buy designer clothes, so she mixed and matched, she says. She graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and went to work at J.P. Morgan Asset Management before moving on to Merrill Lynch and Centric Wealth Management in 2018, where she is currently director of financial planning.
Fashion is central to the couple’s relationship. When they first met in 2008, when they were both working in J.P. Morgan’s wealth management unit in Chicago, each noticed the other’s clothes. “She was chic and classy,” says Fei. “I pay attention to style.” Kelli remembers the first time she saw her now-husband walk by in a suit. “He looked the Wall Street-financier part,” she says.
After their wedding in Lake Como, Italy, the couple honeymooned at JK Place (now called The Place), in Florence, a hotel that also influenced the design of their home. They started traveling to Italy and France every year because they love traveling and shopping together, and they both appreciate the goal of having the best experience possible, whether it is food, art, clothing or design. “The downside of that is there’s no voice of reason,” jokes Fei.
The Wangs say they have passed their fashion appreciation on to their 2½-year-old daughter, Gemma, who loves to hang out in the accessory room of the closet, where she tries on her mom’s shoes. In Gemma’s own bedroom, a shelf is filled with miniature designer bags: Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Louis Vuitton. “She has a better sense of style than both of us,” says Kelli.
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Report by the San Francisco Fed shows small increase in premiums for properties further away from the sites of recent fires
3 min
Wildfires in California have grown more frequent and more catastrophic in recent years, and that’s beginning to reflect in home values, according to a report by the San Francisco Fed released Monday.
The effect on home values has grown over time, and does not appear to be offset by access to insurance. However, “being farther from past fires is associated with a boost in home value of about 2% for homes of average value,” the report said.
In the decade between 2010 and 2020, wildfires lashed 715,000 acres per year on average in California, 81% more than the 1990s. At the same time, the fires destroyed more than 10 times as many structures, with over 4,000 per year damaged by fire in the 2010s, compared with 355 in the 1990s, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture cited by the report.
That was due in part to a number of particularly large and destructive fires in 2017 and 2018, such as the Camp and Tubbs fires, as well the number of homes built in areas vulnerable to wildfires, per the USDA account.
The Camp fire in 2018 was the most damaging in California by a wide margin, destroying over 18,000 structures, though it wasn’t even in the top 20 of the state’s largest fires by acreage. The Mendocino Complex fire earlier that same year was the largest ever at the time, in terms of area, but has since been eclipsed by even larger fires in 2020 and 2021.
As the threat of wildfires becomes more prevalent, the downward effect on home values has increased. The study compared how wildfires impacted home values before and after 2017, and found that in the latter period studied—from 2018 and 2021—homes farther from a recent wildfire earned a premium of roughly $15,000 to $20,000 over similar homes, about $10,000 more than prior to 2017.
The effect was especially pronounced in the mountainous areas around Los Angeles and the Sierra Nevada mountains, since they were closer to where wildfires burned, per the report.
The study also checked whether insurance was enough to offset the hit to values, but found its effect negligible. That was true for both public and private insurance options, even though private options provide broader coverage than the state’s FAIR Plan, which acts as an insurer of last resort and provides coverage for the structure only, not its contents or other types of damages covered by typical homeowners insurance.
“While having insurance can help mitigate some of the costs associated with fire episodes, our results suggest that insurance does little to improve the adverse effects on property values,” the report said.
While wildfires affect homes across the spectrum of values, many luxury homes in California tend to be located in areas particularly vulnerable to the threat of fire.
“From my experience, the high-end homes tend to be up in the hills,” said Ari Weintrub, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s in Los Angeles. “It’s up and removed from down below.”
That puts them in exposed, vegetated areas where brush or forest fires are a hazard, he said.
While the effect of wildfire risk on home values is minimal for now, it could grow over time, the report warns. “This pattern may become stronger in years to come if residential construction continues to expand into areas with higher fire risk and if trends in wildfire severity continue.”
