Tommy Diller

Chicago transplants Tommy and Lisa Diller found a house that felt like home in Glenwood.

The couple previously lived in Collegedale, which was convenient to Mrs. Diller’s job as a historian and teacher at Southern Adventist University, but when they were ready to look for a house, they focused on properties closer to town.

“We liked living in the city,” said Mr. Diller, a nurse anesthetist at Parkridge and Memorial hospitals. “We wanted to have an old house where we could move right in, and Glenwood is a great community.”

The Dillers have filled their 1910 American foursquare with antiques and other accouterments dear to them.

The foursquare construction style — four rooms downstairs and four upstairs — is “a very efficient way of building a house,” Mrs. Diller said.

From the deck off the back of the house, it is evident the second-floor windows once were doors, leading the couple to believe a two-story deck or two-story addition once made the structure even larger.

The Dillers, both 34, moved into the neighborhood, on the west side of Missionary Ridge, five and a half years ago. Their home is situated on a shady double lot.

“The (wide) front porch and the yard are fantastic drawing cards,” Mr. Diller said. “We felt very lucky.”

Mrs. Diller said she was raised in West Virginia in a home in which old furniture was used for everyday living. So, “in an old home, it makes sense” for the couple to do the same thing, she said.

Mrs. Diller said her mother back in West Virginia spotted many of the items that now are a part of the couple’s home.

Floors throughout the house, with the exception of the kitchen, are the original oak.

Wood accents around the fireplaces, windows and foot molding in the living room, and the neo-classical wood details between the entry and living room, are pine, which had been stripped of layers of paint before they bought the house.

Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that flank the living room fireplace are the only additions the couple made to the house.

A cedar chest built in the early 1900s by Mr. Diller’s great-grandfather in the entry and a rocking chair from his Pennsylvania Mennonite family in the living room are among the couple’s many keepsakes.

Their formal dining room features crown molding and an original window seat. A Victrola, 1930s dining room furniture and banjo clock lend period authenticity to the room.

A built-in, floor-to-ceiling hutch with leaded glass doors affords space for dishes and other serving items.

While the kitchen has a more modern look with red walls and white cabinets, it also has a 1940s gas stove the couple bought in New Mexico.

They believe their dinette, which Mrs. Diller’s mother found, is from the late 19th century because of its planks and pegs construction.

The second floor

On the switchback stairs to the second floor is a gallery of family pictures.

The couple’s spacious master bedroom contains a fireplace that once burned coal but which they hope to convert to gas. They believe the decorative gold metal fireplace cover is original to the home.

“The marble tiles (in front of the fireplace) are traditional to this era,” Mrs. Diller said.

The couple’s five-piece bedroom suite is of an art deco-inspired waterfall design they believe dates to the 1930s.

The home has four bedroom spaces. One of those, off the master bedroom, may have once been a nursery, Mrs. Diller said.

In the couple’s guest bedroom, the four-piece Victorian bedroom suite from West Virginia dates to the 1920s, they believe.

The other bedroom on the second floor contains bedroom furniture Mr. Diller’s parents won in a contest, including the bed Mr. Diller slept on when he was growing up in Maryland. It also has a cedar chest Mrs. Diller’s father made for the couple as a wedding present.

“We try to incorporate as much from our families as we can,” Mrs. Diller said.

The full upstairs bath contains a clawfoot tub and cabinet they believe are original to the home, a sink they believe may be original (surrounded by a fireplace mantel that works as a shelf), period-look lights and a tile floor.

The basement and yard

With three courses of brick foundation, the basement provides evidence the house was built solidly and with thought to keeping it as cool as possible in the summer before air conditioning.

Three nearly century-old shade trees, probably planted when the house was built, also keep it cool, Mrs. Diller said.

The couple have accentuated the yard — which already included several prodigious fig trees — with shrubs, flowers, a grape arbor (built by Mr. Diller and his father), and, this year, vegetables along the front bank next to the sidewalk.

The Dillers also installed privacy and wrought-iron fences around parts of the yard. Before doing so, they talked to their neighbors. “We don’t want to think of walling them off,” Mrs. Diller said.

Indeed, the couple said they rely on their neighbors, and vice versa, for information on neighborhood happenings.

“This is a neighborhood where people live for a long time,” Mrs. Diller said.

To stay up on news in their community, the couple spend as much time as possible in their comfortable brown faux wicker furniture — a housewarming present from friends — on the wide front porch of their first home.

“We have all the joys and stresses of an old home,” said Mrs. Diller.

“We try to listen to what the house is teaching us.”

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