Nickerson House

The Samuel M. Nickerson House is a Chicago Landmark located at 40 East Erie Street in the Near North Side neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Built in 1883 for Samuel and Mathilda Nickerson, the mansion is one of the most significant surviving examples of Gilded Age residential architecture in the United States. Today it houses the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, which opened to the public in 2008 and focuses on the decorative arts and design of the Gilded Age and Art Nouveau periods. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was designated a Chicago landmark on September 28, 1977.

Samuel Mayo Nickerson commissioned the house in 1879, replacing an earlier residence destroyed in the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. Nickerson, his wife Mathilda Pinkham Crosby, and their son Roland lived in the mansion from 1883 to 1900. Upon retiring as president of the First National Bank of Chicago in 1900, Nickerson sold the house to Lucius George Fisher, president of Union Bag and Paper Co., who owned it until his death in 1916. The family's decision to sell sparked what is believed to be Chicago's first successful preservation effort. In 1916, a group of wealthy Chicagoans purchased the house and donated it to the American College of Surgeons (ACS), which used it as headquarters and built the adjacent Murphy Memorial Auditorium for meetings. When the mansion became too small for the ACS, it began renting it out in 1964. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. In 2003, Chicago investor and philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus acquired the building, established it as a museum, and commissioned an award-winning restoration. The Driehaus Museum opened to the public in June 2008. In 2022, the museum acquired the adjacent John B. Murphy Memorial Auditorium, and on June 21, 2024 opened the expanded Driehaus Museum campus.

The Driehaus Museum does not recreate the Nickerson period but broadly interprets and displays the prevailing design, architecture, and decorating tastes of Gilded Age America and the Art Nouveau era through permanent and special exhibitions. The museum's holdings draw from the private Driehaus Collection of Fine and Decorative Arts, a diverse assemblage of European and American artifacts created predominantly between 1880 and 1920. The collection supplements the works of the mansion's original architects and interior designers. The museum is particularly noted for its significant holdings of works by Louis Comfort Tiffany and his associated firms, comprising over 1,500 objects including Favrile glass, vases, furniture, accessories, and stained and leaded-glass windows. Richard H. Driehaus acquired his first Tiffany work, a stained-glass window, in 1978.

Highlights of the Tiffany objects on permanent display include a set of brightly colored iridescent stemware; a large fire screen with iridescent chain mail tiles; a unique centerpiece lamp with a base of eight large nautilus shells; and a green blown-glass humidor. The museum also displays an urn-shaped turtleback glass chandelier in the sitting room and a Lily table lamp in the drawing room. Among the furniture collection is a suite of carved neo-Empire maple chairs by George A. Schastey and Co. of New York, one of the original decorators of the Nickerson House; a rare Chickering and Sons grand piano; and a Nickerson-era Herter Brothers extension dining table of quarter-sawn white oak. Other notable pieces include a brass chandelier from Thurlow Lodge with boars' heads, hunting arrows, and hunting horns; Émile Gallé vases; Sèvres vases; a gilt-bronze mantel clock by Deniére; paintings by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; and a Venetian marble sculpture by Oscar Spalmach depicting Cupid and Psyche. The museum also preserves original Nickerson furnishings including seat furniture in the drawing room, a settee, rocking chair, and side chairs in the front parlor, the chandelier and chairs in the library, and Samuel M. Nickerson's original dining room table.

The Nickerson House was designed by Edward J. Burling of the firm of Burling and Whitehouse, one of Chicago's earliest prominent architectural practices. The three-story, 24,000 square-foot mansion was reportedly the largest and most extravagant private residence in Chicago at the time of its completion, constructed at a cost of $450,000. The Italianate exterior is built of limestone and Ohio sandstone. Three decorators were contracted for the interiors: William August Fiedler and R. W. Bates and Co. of Chicago, and New York-based George A. Schastey and Co. The interiors are decorated with seventeen types of marble, earning the house its nickname of the Marble Palace, along with onyx, alabaster, carved and inlaid wood, glazed and patterned tiles by Minton Hollins and Co. and J. and J. G. Low Art Tile Works, mosaics, and Lincrusta. With a majority of its original features intact, the building is a well-preserved example of the Aesthetic Movement as translated into the design of homes for wealthy Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, incorporating influences from Japanese, Chinese, English, French, Moorish, ancient Greek, and Renaissance Italian sources. The mansion was also notable as one of the first truly fireproof residences in the city, with brick masonry, partition walls carried up to the roof, and flooring strips bedded in mortar beneath decorative boards, followed by brick arches supported by iron beams. The second owner, Lucius George Fisher, hired Prairie School architect George Washington Maher to redesign Nickerson's art gallery into a trophy room and rare book library, with a stained glass dome replacing the room's skylight and a monumental mantlepiece attributed to Robert E. Seyfarth with an iridescent glass tile fire surround by Giannini and Hilgart.

The Richard H. Driehaus Museum is located at 50 East Erie Street on the Near North Side in Chicago, Illinois, near the Magnificent Mile. The museum is accessible and available for events. Public transit access includes CTA bus routes 3, 10, 26, 36, 125, 143, 146-148, and 151, and Chicago L stations at Chicago and Grand. The museum offers guided tours daily in addition to general admission, with tours available Tuesday through Sunday at 10:30am, 11:30am, 1:30pm, and 3:30pm. Themed tours offered on a seasonal basis include the living history-style Servants' Tour featuring the mansion's servants' quarters and led by a fictional housekeeper; the McCormickville Walking Tour of the surrounding historic neighborhood; and the evening Twilight Tour discussing how the Nickersons and other Gilded Age Chicago elite socialized and spent their evening hours. The museum also produces public programs including concerts, lectures, and family programs, such as quarterly jazz concerts featuring members of the Chicago Jazz Orchestra and the Samuel M. Nickerson Lecture Series. The second floor, formerly the Nickerson family's living quarters, serves as exhibition space, while the third floor contains a ballroom for public programs and a lounge with an Art Nouveau furniture suite by Edward Colonna. The museum previously operated the Driehaus Gallery of Stained Glass at Navy Pier, which closed in 2017.