Cuneo Mansion and Gardens

If you're going to possess obscene riches, the least you can do is leave behind remarkable buildings for later generations to see. The heirs of Commodore Vanderbilt were good at it. Unfortunately for me, it's a long drive to the nearest Vanderbilt legacy structure. Fortunately, other robberbarons had similar impulses, including Commonwealth Edison founder Samuel Insull, who had a notion to have an Italianate mansion built for him a fairly close to where I would live nearly 100 years later.

Though not very warm, last Friday was clear and dry. More importantly, Lilly and Ann were still on spring break and Yuriko had the day off, so we all made the drive to the Cuneo Mansion and Gardens in Vernon Hills, Illinois, a suburb in Lake County. Biltmore, it isn't. Still, its lavishness befits a power utility mogul of yore.

But it isn't the Insull Mansion and Gardens, though in the 1910s he hired architect Benjamin Marshall to design the former and landscape architect Jens Jensen the latter. The Depression crushed the business fortune -- and more astonishingly, the personal fortune -- of Samuel Insull, so he was obliged to sell the property to another high-net-worth individual (high, as in stratosphere): John Cuneo Sr., a Chicago printing baron. Now the property of Loyola University, the mansion still carries the name of its second owner.