My Palace in Chicago - Meg Gustafson and Jonathan Solomon

“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences – wherever you happened to be”

— Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Hello party people, how was your summer? I hope you had a great one no matter how Lana or Brat coded it is. I often feel like whenever I’m writing this new intro, in some ways I’m announcing or facing the reality that it’s the changing of the season and I am that LiveJournal author sending out life updates. This blog turned three years old in 2024 and being profiled by D Magazine for this project was something I never dreamt of starting out, with that I am forever grateful.

I started My Palace in Dallas during the height of the pandemic, and it was born from pure curiosity: I want to know, I want to see, and, most importantly, I want to document what the people around me have become after these unprecedented years. They can be artists or comedians, or they can also be the people you meet on the street—which is quite hard cause supposedly people in Dallas don’t walk at all. So, what is it that they do? This project delves into their stories and, as the name suggests, explores their Palace in Dallas.

Without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Meg Gustafson and Jonathan Solomon! I’ve been a fan of 80s Deco for a while and after stumbling upon a piece about their eclectic historic home on Dwell, I decided to be brave and send out that special email everyone I interviewed with has gotten. The rest is history, on a lovely October afternoon, we talked about the house, preservation, and how their taste combined and got one of the most breathtaking home tours I’ve ever seen.

Hello Meg and Jonathan! Thank you for sitting down with me today! Before I bomb you with questions, for anyone who might not have the chance to know who you are, would you like to tell me a bit about yourself? Who are you and what is it that you do?

**M (Meg):** My name is Meg Gustafson, I’m an urban planner for the city of Chicago and the owner of an art space called Hammy Wammy.
**J (Jonathan):** I am Jonathan Solomon, I’m an architect and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am also a partner in a firm that works in architectural preservation called Preservation Futures.

From preserving the city's historic architecture to drawing inspiration from the decor in the 80s, your tastes clash together and blossom in this historic home in uptown. Could you tell me what that journey was like for you? How did you two get to where you are now?

M: For me, it all started around 2013 on Tumblr. I had a page called 80s Deco dabbling in 80s furniture and interiors but I didn’t know how to incorporate that into my real life. Let me tell you, 80s furniture back then was plentiful and fairly cheap. RIP to The Ark thrift store. I would look at 80s imagery for hours and post them to Tumblr, later on to Instagram. Obsessing over those images I would say is what helped me develop my own style.

Around that time, I had a classic Chicago 1905 apartment and went crazy with 80s furniture. We got rid of anything that wasn’t 80s, painted the walls bold colors and patterns, bought a horrible leather couch off Craigslist, and filled the space with all the pieces we could find from that era. (We were featured in Mirror 80s here and in the Chicago Reader ). There was also a little high-rise apartment in between.

In 2019 I bought a worker's cottage and went a little overboard with the 80s there too. Curbed featured it as well as Apartment Therapy.

I started the 80s Deco Instagram account when I was traveling alone in London during their Design Week, so a lot of my early followers were British. From there, I started curating my favorite images and I’ve got around 75k followers.

Was the Instagram success what kicked off the launch of Hammy Wammy as a studio and event space?

M: I think so! Hammy Wammy is kind of a glorified storage space. Jonathan and I share a love for things, furniture, and good deals that I just can’t pass up. So we have too much stuff. The studio became a place we rent out by the hour for pieces that I’ve collected all these years that didn’t fit our direction for this house.

This house, different from the one I did in Bridgeport which leaned heavily into the Memphis color palette and style, is more eclectic.

J: This house is more eclectic because it represents the merging of our aesthetic worlds, after meeting each other in 2019, getting married in 2022, and moving in together the same year. To form a good balance, which is what we want to achieve here, some of Meg’s pieces ended up in Hammy Wammy.

And what was your journey like Jonathan?

J: I knew I would be an architect from an early age. I come from a family of architects, my father, father’s father, mother’s father, and both of their brothers were all architects, so I was genetically predisposed, let’s say, and early on I knew I would enter the profession of architecture.

But it did take me a comparatively long time to realize I wasn’t a designer. I didn’t enjoy my own design work nearly as much as I did the work of other people. As a result, I spent a lot of time teaching, doing curatorial and editorial work, and other projects that let me talk about and engage in what other people were doing.

Aside from a long-running interest in the existing built-in environment, I had not considered myself a preservationist until relatively recently, during the pandemic. I went on sabbatical from The Art Institute and began to work first casually with a friend, Elizabeth Blasius, and later on through the firm we founded, in the field of preservation.

When I first met Meg, I did not find the high-80s aesthetic that she had assembled to be particularly pleasing. It just wasn’t something I surrounded myself with or had much exposure to. But I respected her commitment as a collector and manager of an environment, which is something I take very seriously. Ultimately Meg’s specific world became something I appreciate, the various materials Meg had, combined with my interest and accumulation of pieces through time—mostly from my family, “inheritance chic” if you will— -

M: His parents were in Chicago buying art - folk art specifically - in the 70s and 80s, pieces from Chicago artists like Roger Brown.

J: My mother in particular had an abiding interest in American folk art and you can see some of her collection around the house. Her father, my grandfather, was an architect and artist, a painter, and a self-styled assemblage sculptor in the mode of Joseph Cornell. For instance, the wall sculpture with the red arrow on it, and the cookie jar in the kitchen are his. He had a sweet tooth. As Meg mentioned, many objects around the house are either made by or collected by other people in my family. A particular set of things I refuse to live without.

In a house from 1896, how did you two form such a cohesive look not just between your own view on aesthetics but within a space that had the bone of a completely different era?

J: When Meg and I met, she was living in a house in Bridgeport and I was living in an apartment in Lincoln Park. We wanted to move in together and we wanted to be in a house. We wanted a home that was old enough to have some character because we love old things and both enjoy working from something that existed rather than from scratch.

M: Both of us are more curators than we are creators. We work much better curating an assemblage of objects that have already been created, Jonathan is the same way, and even with him being trained in architecture, building a single-family home from scratch in Chicago—even if we could—didn’t really appeal to us.

J: We also didn't want something that was too precious, a museum, or a bubble that couldn’t be burst. One of the goals for this house was timelessness, we wanted this place to accommodate our art and individual expression, but not be immediately placable in time and therefore not dependent on maintaining a stylistic consistency. If anything were changed, fixed, or patched it wouldn’t feel like the house glitched, or felt out of place.

Another goal we had in creating this house was the complex relationship between the high- and low-end, or the real and the fake. We wanted to have what we called a 70/30 relationship between the fake and the real.

M: I’m good at sourcing weird objects that could pass as the real deal! *laughs

J: A completely high-end environment is boring to us, even if we could have that, we don’t want to live in a Four Seasons hotel, because where is the fun in that? The idea was to be clever incorporating both the real and the fake, both the high and the low, so the house appears neither too garish nor ramshackle, there are enough occasional authentic and expensive pieces around that the inexpensive or even just found or approximated parts of the house flow together and all can be seen as one cohesive entity. At the same time, worn-out wood, scratches, and marks, the patina of living, blends in and doesn’t look like a fault.

We’re interested in how something takes on the mantle of authenticity, when and where or how it happens, and what it can happen to. Most things became special not because they were expensive or fancy but because they were personal, loved, or persistent over time.

M: We live in a time where objects are produced with such low quality. I’ve bought many of them over the years, but it always breaks my heart when they fall apart because they weren’t made or designed to last and I became attached. I’ve learned to stop buying from Wayfair or Amazon because things tend to break rather quickly. I search Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist a few times a month. Being burned by crappy new things has helped us stay creative and weird.

J: There are still things around the house that are new, like our radiators, a huge splurge but worth it. We both love radiant heat during Chicago winters. The whole system is new, it’s hot water, which is more efficient than steam. We sourced two sets of radiators, one looking old and the other new, the idea was to play with timelessness. The kitchen table and the bar are both new pieces, too. We commissioned them from friends, just like we try to buy art from friends, so the environment feels made up of people we know and love.

There are many color schemes in the 80s interior and they’re all drastically different from room to room, far different from your Memphis-style primary color-heavy house in Bridgeport, how did you decide the colors for each room in this house?

M: It took me over 6 months to pick out the colors. My goal is to not be boring. Color is so fun and subjective, there’s no point trying to please everyone. Our bedroom is an example where I’m still not entirely sure it works, but it’s just weird enough that you can hopefully appreciate what I’m trying to achieve. The yellow, green, maroon and lilac are a nod to Luke Edward Hall’s hotel in France. Like many things, some days I’m not sure if I love it, but it’s only paint, I can redo the yellow ceiling wherever I want.

Our kitchen took me a long time because the cabinets aren’t very easily repainted. The kitchen and dining room share a palette. Muted green, dark green and race car red is a classic Italian combo we both adore. I added pinky/coral to make it a little more modern and risky.

A major challenge was complimenting colors to all the wood elements. A lot of '80s palettes don’t play well with wood. The wood is an almost prairie-style color that is a lot lighter than typical for the age this house was built. Jonathan’s apartment was dark wood so when we moved in we thought of staining it darker, but I wanted to keep it because it was original to the house and was miraculously in good shape.

J: I remember you settled on green for the ground floor in relation to the wood pretty early on. We were just welcoming the 90s aesthetic into our world, blonde wood and green is a 90s motif that you identified as something you wanted to work with, then you brought in the red to pair with the green, balancing it out with the pink.

As a preservationist, with this house being around 125 years old was there any part of the house that you thought of keeping or recognized as something that definitely needed to be preserved during the move-in?

J: My firm, Preservation Futures, and my work as a preservationist is focused on areas where preservation has not been operating traditionally. One of our projects is the preservation of the recent past—buildings for less than 50 years—which fits in well with the house and the other is subjects that fall outside of the mainstream narrative.

As a result, my approach as a preservationist isn’t hyper-fixated on material authenticity or period significance. To be honest, from this point of view, there isn’t anything specific about this house that I felt drawn to or compelled by. I think that’s a good thing because the house doesn’t have a definable style, and there’s no historical incident that took place here, it wasn’t designed by a well-known architect, making it non-contributing despite sitting in the historic district.

We agreed our preservation approach was to breathe new life into the house and to keep it going for another 125 years, which means keeping parts of the old and incorporating the new. After our walkthrough, we knew we wanted to keep the wood, the trim, and the crown molding in the front room, and the floors, outside of changes that were necessary structurally, and even where we had to patch the floor, we were explicit about making it look like a patch.

Like how you’d be curious about their letterbox account when you meet a film lover or would love to take a peek at someone’s mood board, can you tell me what consists of your media diet and where you usually get your inspiration from?

M: If I’m ever feeling uninspired I like to watch 80s and 90s thrillers from Michael Mann, Robert de Palma, Peter Greenaway, and Dario Argento for the interiors.

This Tumblr is a gold mine: https://80s-movies-interiors.tumblr.com/

also: https://www.instagram.com/interiorandfilms/

and https://www.instagram.com/filmandfurniture/

I’ve been enjoying a few Instagram accounts that are posting about the 90s but I am also freaked out by it because I actually lived through that time period.

Speaking of the 90s, Evan Collins is the undisputed leading researcher. 80sDeco owes him a lot!

https://cari.institute/history

All of these accounts are his:

https://www.instagram.com/y2kaesthetic/

https://www.instagram.com/frasurbane/

https://www.instagram.com/evancollins90/

J: As I’ve gotten older I’m more comfortable trusting my gut. So I will go on the record and say that the visual language of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) is incredibly rich, and has been an ongoing reference for me. It’s just a trove of late 80s and leading-edge 90s costume, interior, and product design. Carpet in a spaceship? Only during that very specific period from 1988-1992 would that ever have been ok!

My primary source of inspiration, though, is my field, architecture. Buildings and spaces I admire. I’m interested in architects, buildings, meaning, and their movement throughout history. If you look around, you can see there are elements in the house where we were able to give a nod to them, like our carpeting, which references the carpet in Paul Rudolph's Yale art and architecture building. Meg won me over with the color scheme in the kitchen when we realized it was an homage to Gae Aulenti’s Stazione Cadorna in Milan.

It’s been four years since the pandemic hit and for some reason, we all came out alright, if not stronger. What did you do to stay centered and sane? Have any of those new habits carried over now that things are back to normal?

M: We enjoyed cooking together. Finding difficult or weird recipes to try out, like stews that might take us all day to make. How we worked together helped inform the kitchen design.

J: We cooked, went on walks, we had small-scale gatherings when it was allowed or within our small bubble.

M: When the pandemic hit we had just started dating so I would go to his place for a little staycation. We were lucky to be freshly in love and that our jobs were flexible enough to not let the pandemic disrupt our lives too much.

I’m sure you have your fair share of traveling experience and exposure to different scenes across the states and even countries. From an industry perspective, what do you think sets Chicago apart from all the other well-known big cities or any other city you’ve been to?

M: We’re both Chicagoans so we have strong opinions about this. What makes Chicago so amazing is it is affordable and I think we are moving away from that with the inflation and rents going sky-high. I don’t see why anyone would stay here if it’s the same price as New York or LA. People can come here to be artists and live affordably. I hope that doesn’t go away.

We are also the home of a great architectural legacy, from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to Mies van der Rohe, to Stanley Tigerman, which I also hope we don’t squander.

J: That’s an essential point, you can get people in Chicago to come off the street to attend an event that's about architecture, you can’t do that in New York. There are more architects in New York, sure, but you don’t get the same general population that shares a sense of ownership over their city and architecture. There’s a sense that architecture is common property and something to have pride in here, everyone is allowed to have an opinion or say something about it.

Both being Chicagoans and having spent quite some time finding your identity here, what do YOU think of this city?

M: As a Chicagoan, I can go on and on about our urban planning and all the mistakes we’ve made, car dominance, strip malls, parking lots, tearing down important buildings. But I love it here.

J: There’s a lot wrong happening in Chicago, it’s deeply car-centric, it’s one of the most segregated cities in the world, and it’s way behind the curve in terms of policies on transportation and housing.

M: Chicago has an impressive parks system including a public lakefront which goes a long way for our quality of life. Compared to the rest of the US, we also have a pretty good public transportation system. The CTA has so much potential. it’s hard to watch it lose ridership (young people taking Uber etc) and funding, which has become a vicious cycle.

J: Chicago is starting to fall behind in architecture too. We call ourselves an architectural city but our preservation policy, staffing levels, and survey resources are all well behind New York or Los Angeles. This is a city that fostered three major architectural movements, first in the Louis Sullivan era, second in the Mies van der Rohe era, and third from the Stanley Tigerman era. We’re not keeping up with those standards today I think we need to hold ourselves as a community to a higher standard and be willing to push back when bad buildings are built.

As I look around I can see a lot of your taste in a tangible form! Now the hard part is, what would you say is your most prized possession in your home?

J: Let’s walk! We can do this room by room because it’s impossible to pick just one. *laughs

M: This is our sunroom, the windows were already here but we went against preservation judgment and painted the brick white. *laughs

J: Both the credenza and the art piece above came from my grandfather, via my father, they’re pieces that have been in my life forever that I couldn’t not have in the house. Someone once asked me if this relief was a Marc Chagall, which it most certainly is not, it’s something my grandfather made with his friends.

The sheep is from a mini golf course that my father designed in the 1980s, called Lambs Farm, in Libertyville, Illinois. By the time I went back there, many years later, the sheep were all just lying around rotting so I asked if I could take one home, a real heritage folk art piece for me.

J: The kitchen used to be two rooms, there was a formal dining room with French doors and a little kitchen with a bathroom in the corner. Our first move was something you’ve heard of, the open concept. We removed a wall, took the wainscoting and moved it upstairs, and instead of hiding a new beam, we left it exposed and painted it red.

The inspiration for the kitchen was the service kitchen you’d see in a huge British manor, think Downton Abbey, a hearth and a big table and copper pots clanging around.

M: Of course, not much of that translates to the modern kitchen, a huge open fireplace with cauldrons wouldn’t be up to code, but that was our inspiration and reference when designing this space.

J: To get there, we moved the bathroom over closer to the back door. We put the vent and stove symmetrical to the window alongside this beautiful high backsplash Meg designed that balances the different heights between windows.

Meg didn't want corners in the kitchen, and I agreed, we wanted it to be a bigger and more useful galley kitchen.

M: We naively wanted open shelving but anyone will tell you it doesn’t really work because you have to constantly clean off sticky oil-covered dust.

J: A fireplace in the front room that we decommissioned and repurposed its chimney to make this one in the kitchen work. It’s not an open hearth because for a fireplace with this depth you need a door to cover it up, so no pot simmering on an open flame. We used Venetian plaster for a rough texture, and the rough-cut stone mantle is a very 80s look too.

J: All of our art deserves its own time and space but I’ll list a few.

The pepper grinder was a gift to myself for my 45th birthday. It’s the largest pepper grinder we could find, by Peugeot which is the first name in pepper grinders apparently.

Our friend Moira Quinn made this pickle rug for us, this is a big pickle household.

The motorcycles my parents bought in the 1970s, there was an amusement park called Riverview in Chicago that had closed a decade earlier, and these were from its merry-go-round. They probably date back at least to the 30s.

Taking a peek at the mudroom/bathroom, Meg picked out the coral color to moderate the red and green from the kitchen. We have an example of a modern radiator in this room, and the precise toilet paper holder from my childhood bathroom that we were able to source!

M: This couch is my favorite piece in the room, Roberto Matta’s Malitte modular system couch from the late '60s. It needed to be reupholstered so we covered it in pink to make it more '80s.

We have our illuminated molded plastic column here. I found it on Craigslist from a house out by the airport. It was part of an outdoor Christmas display.

This is another example of our 70/30 rule, this is our DIY Ettore Sottsass I made out of a few tissue boxes, painter's tape, and a lampshade.

J: We have a few Art Institute students’ works in the house, the side tables are by Yasmeen Arkadian, a graduate student in the Masters of Fine Arts program. They are made out of pieces of the deck and stairs from the Edith Farnsworth House, its Travertine has been replaced three times and these were sourced from its latest replacement. The breaks are just gorgeous.

J: We put our address in neon in the coat closet! Because it’s such an old house there are windows in every room including the closets, which again led to us being less precious with windows, generally. So this window became a sign facing outwards.

Another project of ours is this shallow coat closet that isn’t deep enough for a hanger yet also has a large window. We turned this into a toy closet by adding glass shelves and LED strips to light it up. It’s multigenerational, my children’s, mine, and my father's collections are all displayed in one place. My father had a huge collection of led soldiers and you’re only seeing a tiny portion of the total army. My kids were born in Hong Kong, so here you can see their Anpanman, Tomika, and Plarail toys, and you can see my Transformers and Matchbox cars here at the bottom.

What I’ve been collecting recently are Lego Friends and the 90s Polly Pocket. I didn’t grow up with them, after my time, but now, I get to have them. *laughs

This is a chair, a prototype for the Sinmi Chair by Norman Teague, which is now in the Art Institute right next to the Barcelona Chair by Mies. Norman was a student at the Art Institute and he gave me two of these, actually. I left one behind for the Department, foolishly!

Meg chose a darker color for the stairs, hall, and the library, orange, to play off the narrower space up here. Meg also designed this light fixture. It's just a normal commercial fixture, it’s designed to be able to turn a corner, and she just had it turn back and forth five times to make a zig-zag.

And we are almost at the bottom of my list of Qs for today, for those who are interested in getting into this business or starting something of their own. What suggestions or advice would you like to give them or wish you had known sooner?

M: If you’re asking about running a space like Hammy Wammy, I would encourage people to try and buy used/vintage items. It lends instant authenticity. Nothing is made with lasting intentions anymore and new and vintage are often the same price - especially couches.

Secondly, don’t be afraid of weird paint colors because you can always re-paint. Yes, paint can cost a lot of money but it’s pretty low stakes. Don’t forget the ceilings!

In reference to 80sDeco and gaining followers on IG- I would say to credit people. Always cite your sources and influences and be as generous as possible.

J: The best advice I can give to someone interested in preservation: like what you like without reservation and find a community of people who care about it as much as you do. I think that if preservation is to survive as a profession in our culture it has to be led by people, it can’t be a top-down perspective, it can’t be a group of architectural historians showing up and telling you not to tear down certain buildings or sell your house because of some abstract value that you don’t share. The movement needs to be led by communities that cherish their buildings and need our help to keep them vital. Preservationists have to stop looking down on the world and start looking up to it. If you happen to only like Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Sullivan that’s great, there is a lot of work for you to do in preservation, go forth and do good. But if you appreciate things that may appear to be unworthy of preservation, you’ll be surprised because someone out there would appreciate it just as much as you do.

To wrap this interview up, also because I am curious personally, what’s on the horizon for you? Are any “Big things coming” in the works for you? What would you like the world (whichever random soul stumbled upon this article) to know about?

J: We’ve been so exhausted after putting the house together, it’s been a few years of planning and execution and we’re enjoying just living in it.

M: As Jonathan said, we’re excited to just be in our house. We plan to have more dinner parties with people from different parts of our lives and force them to socialize. *evil laugh

J: Both of us would like to learn more about home management and upkeep, we have all these systems that require our constant attention, and in many cases, we depend on other people’s expertise to maintain them and gradually we’d like to know more about that ourselves.

M: We also look forward to changing the paint colors in a few years when we get sick of these. *laughs