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Property Location
Property Features
Sunset Point was the summer retreat for Chicago's "Gentleman Gambler." M. J. Tennes started the General News Bureau, which wired race results to bookmakers across the country, operated a vast number of gambling establishments in Chicago, and ran floating gambling and off-track betting parlors in Lake Michigan aboard luxury liners. In 1927-28, he built Sunset Point as a summer estate, occupying eleven acres at the tip of the two-mile-long peninsula jutting into Catfish Lake.
Tennes commissioned Rudolph and Elizabeth Nedved of Chicago to design the estate. Rudolph had won the 1926 Chicago Architectural Award, which paid for travels to England and France to study architecture. He created this rambling, 12,000-square-foot estate, patterned after rural medieval farmhouses in the Normandy region of northwest France. The conical tower next to the entry porch marks the French Norman style. A steep clay-tiled roof shelters walls built of cut stone, false half-timbering and stucco, and shingles. Wall dormers lighting the upper story create a lively interplay of gables. The designers also created a coach house and a two-story boathouse--including a 90-seat chapel upstairs--which juts into the lake.
Someone in the Tenney family must have been a bird watcher. Bird perches and built-in birdhouses peek out from under the roof’s flared eaves. Some 250 bird houses, built especially for the estate, dotted the landscape and enhanced the naturalistic setting that landscape designers Swain and Nelson of Chicago created, including flower beds, lawns, shrubs, pines, statuary, an interior courtyard defined by decorative stone walls, and a stone bridge.
National And State Register Of Historic Places Listings
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1024 Everett Rd.
93001169
Located in Town of Washington, Vilas County
8810 County Highway N
08000017
Located in Town of Plum Lake, Vilas County
