Quote from Industrial Chicago, 1891, p.245: "The Henry I. Cobb store and apartment building, on North Clark street, was designed by himself in March, 1890. It is 124x70 feet, four stories high, constructed of brick, stone and iron."

The demolished Dr. E.M. Hale house foreshadowed the imminent and abrupt disappearance of Richardsonian design in Chicago residences. A photograph published in the January 1890 Inland Architect shows a battered, rock-faced foundation as the only remnant of the style. Ionic columns surrounded the entrance and supported an oddly scaled architrave and pediment above. Simple, smooth stone topped by dentilled lintels surrounded the first and second story windows. Under an extended roof, the third floor windows were brick arches flush with the brick surface of the house. A Serlian window set on a garland-decorated base above two narrow windows was the principal detail of the side of the house.

Still standing, though somewhat altered, the Dr. John A. McGill residence displays a remarkable change in Cobb's use of historical motifs. In the style of an early French Renaissance chateau with Gothic detailing, the house looks as if it was taken from a child's book of fairy tales. The house is clad in smooth Bedford limestone, the same material Cobb would soon use on his work at the nearby University of Chicago. Two conical-roofed turrets frame an elaborate Gothic entrance portal opening from a terrace covered by a porch roof later addition). At the top of the second floor level runs an elaborate corbel table, which continues along the side and supports a row of crenellations. Above a similar corbel table at the third level, crenellations mark the end of the turret walls. The north façade is more elaborate than that of the street elevation with three segmental arches supporting crenellations above the carriage entrance. Tourelles rise three stories above the carriage entrance with double transomed windows at the second story level, lancets at the third floor level, and tall conical roofs. These roofs flank an elaborate three-window dormer with side and central finials. The interiors rank among the most ornate of Cobb's work. The central hall, hexagonal or octagonal in shape, was paneled in carved dark wood. A similarly carved, U-shaped staircase rose at one side. A massive two-story carriage house at the rear no longer survives. Though the street front and historic references recalled the George Cass house (see below) on Michigan Ave., the McGill house was less richly detailed and imaginatively organized.

The Thomas Murdoch house at 2130 Prairie Ave. was the last of Cobb's residences to display the influence of Richardsonian Romanesque. Set on the usual battered foundation, the house walls are of a random ashlar, but the stone is smooth rather than rock-faced. Paired columns support the customary corner porch, but the openings are trabeated rather than arched. Separated from the top of the corner porch by a rectangular window, a sloped roof comprises one side of a gable facing the side yard. Beyond the gable-topped walls, a triple window with two transoms lights the side elevation. The rest of the house is semi-circular in plan terminated above the third story in a conical roof. Ornament is limited to a low relief frieze topped with a modestly carved string course. Smaller scaled versions of the porch columns flank the third story windows.

Around 1890, Cobb received a commission for one of the earliest luxury apartment buildings to be erected at the corner of Pine St. (now Michigan Ave.) and Chicago Ave. Though the six-story building no longer stands, a photograph was published in the October 1892 volume of Inland Architect. The first floor was of a smooth stone, in contrast to the pressed brick of the upper five stories, with a segmentally arched entrance over which was a slightly projecting stone canopy. Lively metal and glass light fixtures framed both sides of the entrance. Above the corner, a tourelle rose from a semi-circular corbel at the top of the ground floor level to a height of approximately twenty feet above the steep point of the roof ending in a polygonal roof with a spiky finial. The upper five stories terminated in rectangular, stone-transomed sixth floor dormer windows with elaborately designed dormer roofs. Two little hip roofs were placed just above these sixth floor windows. Alternating with these rectangular windows, three narrow projecting bays, more or less triangular in plan, rose to finial topped peaks. The side elevation featured a steep gable rising from the fourth floor to above the attic level.

Quote from Industrial Chicago, 1891, p.247-248: "It has a frontage of sixty feet on Chicago avenue and ninety feet on Pine street, is constructed of pressed brick and stone, and finished inside in hardwood. There are marble floors in halls and vestibule, marble -wainscoting, and the building is heated by steam. A large skylight provides light for the interior. It is supplied with freight and passenger elevators and all the latest improvements. The site was occupied by two old houses which were torn down in July."

Cobb's use of the Renaissance palazzo form predates Sullivan's, Wright's, and other Prairie School architects' interest in it. Seemingly rectangular in plan, the brick house sits on top of a high stone basement. Steps lead up to a front stoop surmounted by a classical aedicule with two Ionic columns at the front and two Ionic pilasters at the rear supporting an architrave and pediment. A variety of embellished Serlian window stands at the second story above the entrance: a lunette carved as a shell tops three windows with an architrave. The other windows are double-hung rectangular windows with simple stone surrounds at the first story and lintels with Greek keys at the second. Stark third story windows are set between a simple string course below and a frieze carved with garlands. This building has been demolished.

Now demolished, the Farlin residence and the attached George M. High residence (see below) were designed in the English Gothic style and faced in Bedford limestone. While of the same style and material as Cobbís University of Chicago buildings, these houses surpassed the University buildings in their design and execution. Designed as a "double dwelling", this was one of Cobb's most sophisticated designs, a non-symmetrical but balanced pairing.

Quote from Industrial Chicago, 1891, p.600: "The plans for a double dwelling, to be erected on the lake shore drive (between Goethe and Scott streets), for George H. High and J. W. Farlin, were made in September, 1891, by Henry Ives Cobb. The house will be three stories and basement high, with a frontage of fifty- four feet, extending back the entire depth of the lot. The design is in the English Gothic style, and will be built of the finest tool-chiseled blue Bedford stone, with a red-tiled roof. The entrance to Mr. Farlin's house will be through an inclosed [sic] porch, while Mr. High's will be through a vestibule, built entirely of stone from the floor to the ceiling to match the exterior of the house. In the former, the library, drawingroom and diningroom, with a spacious hall, will take up the entire first floor, while in the latter, the first story will contain the library, a large hall, receptionroom, a large oval diningroom and kitchen. The second and a part of the third story will be divided into sleepingrooms, while in the rear half of the latter, extending the full width of both houses, will be a magnificent ballroom. The ceiling will be arched, and as the house will be wired for electricity, the ballroom will be lighted by one hundred electric lamps. In the center of the two houses is a light well, which also affords communication from one house to the other, but, should it be desired, this can be closed and communication thus cut off. The interior will be beautifully finished in different kinds of hardwood and heated by steam. The toiletrooms will be laid in tile, and the plumbing, which will be open, will be of the most approved design."

Now demolished, the Gothic-style High residence and the attached J. Whitney Farlin residence (see above) were faced in Bedford limestone. While of the same style and material as Cobbís University of Chicago buildings, these houses surpassed the University buildings in their design and execution. Designed as a "double dwelling," the houses shared a third-floor ballroom and light well. The faÁade elevation was conceived as a unity, but nonetheless individualized the two houses. The entrances to the two houses were at the north and south ends of the faÁade, one arched and one surmounted by four narrow windows below a broken string course. Multi-windowed bays marked the north and south corners. One of the bays with tripled, stone-transomed windows protruded a few feet, allowing north and south side windows. The wider north bay had four grouped windows at all three levels. Both bays terminated in gables with carved crockets near the apex, which terminate in florid finials. This was one of Cobb's most artfully worked out and suavely executed façades.

Now demolished, the George W. Cass Residence balanced display and excess in a careful composition. Though the street front and historic references recalled the Dr. John A. McGill house (see above) on Drexel Blvd., the house was more richly detailed and imaginatively organized. Steps led up to an arched entrance portal surrounded by several carved stone courses at the top of which was an ogee arch. The ogee arch was repeated in the first floor window, the ornate third story dormers, and other openings. Semi-circular tourelles rising from a massively carved corbel table marked each corner of the street façade; their conical roofs reached to the peak of the steeply pitched roof.

The only remaining evidence of the demolished Henry Dibblee house is a photograph in Prominent Buildings Erected by the George A. Fuller Company (1899) p.97. The severely simple form and the cornice proportions made reference to the Florentine palazzo. The house appears to have been constructed of brick or perhaps a smooth gray stone trimmed in a lighter stone. Ionic columns marked the entrance porch, surmounted by an urn-trimmed baluster. The second story windows were topped by an architrave in relief, above which were curved, broken pediments. String courses divided the second from third stories and the third story from the frieze. Above the frieze, large stone brackets supported a simple parapet. At the side was a curved two-story bay with a baluster at the top similar to that at the entrance.

The Charles Offutt-Casper Yost house is a square, two-story, fourteen-room brick block whose Gothic detailing corresponds to that of the contemporaneous University of Chicago buildings. The central stone entrance with its pointed arch recalls the Universityís Ryerson Hall. Two large rectangular windows on either side of the entrance are trimmed with stone sills and brick set at an angle to brickwork above. Pointed dormers, each with a group of three arched windows under ornamental stone lintels, rise above the block, giving it visual interest. An example of Cobbís domestic work at its most utilitarian and well-organized, the home survives as an historic inn. In 1899 Cobb completed a larger residence for Edward Cudahy, his second commission in Omaha (see below).

In April 1893, the Lake Forest College newspaper reported: "The work on Mr. H.I. Cobb's new house is being pushed very rapidly. It will be the largest house in Lake Forest when completed." With a landscape design by Frederick Law Olmsted, the house was grand in size but humble in form: a simple, shingle-covered, three-story block and an attic with a long one-story wing connecting to a smaller, two-story block surrounded on three sides by an open porch. Large, light, and airy with great stone chimneys, the house must have been comfortable for the Cobbs and their eight children. Nevertheless, it was sold at the end of 1895 to become the clubhouse of the Onwentsia Club, of which Cobb was a founding member. The Club demolished an expanded and renovated version of the building in 1928.

Still standing on Lake Forest's Pembroke Road, the three-story house of red brick and white stone is Georgian in style. Entry is gained through a semicircular, Ionic columned entrance porch. Excepting two oval windows above the entrance porch, the other windows are rectangular. A wide flat band marks the top of the second story with a dentilled cornice and a sloping roof with three dormer windows above.

Built on top of a small ridge overlooking the Skokie River to the west, the large David Jones house is beautifully sited. The main block of the house is a rectangle of smoothly finished stone with classic detailing, including a heavy dentilled cornice and a baluster above the attic dormer windows. The north wing of the house relates awkwardly to the main block with its lower roof clumsily joining the main roof. Though damaged by fire and renovated, this house of Wisconsin limestone is extant.

These buildings are extant and were adapted to residential use c.1960 by Edward H. Bennett, Jr.

Images and drawings of this residence were published in the January 1924 issue of Architectural Record.

Originally built as the O.W. Clapp Residence by Burnham & Root in 1877, Cobb's 1891 Federal style music room addition was commissioned by the house's second owner Frank S. Gorton, treasurer of the Western Edison Light Company. The addition was converted to a dressmaker's studio sometime before 1910 and was demolished in 1950. (See: Tyre, William H., "After the Ball is Over" [thesis], Historic Preservation Program, School of The Art Institute of Chicago, June 2001, p.132).

The Professor J.L. Laughlin house was either replaced by—or drastically altered to serve as—a University of Chicago fraternity house in the late 1920s. The original house was large and oddly detailed with a central, three-story block terminating in three gables. A stone entrance projected from the front wall with semi-engaged columns supporting an architrave with a semi-circular bay topped by a baluster above. While all of the windows were trimmed in stone, pediments topped those on the second story and those at the third story were in the form of lunettes.

The exact nature of Brompton and Cobb's roles in the design of these houses are undetermined. Information on this project was gathered from the Property Information Report prepared by the State of Illinois' Historic Architectural/Archeological Resources Geographic Information System (HAARGIS).

Still standing but altered on the street façade, the Professor W.C. Wilkinson house is a simple rectangle of brown Roman brick with large dormers at the third floor level. Without historical reference, the house is a plain, substantial, and well-scaled structure.

Now razed, the twenty-two room Edward Cudahy house was considerably more pretentious than the Charles Offutt-Casper Yost house, Cobb's first house in Omaha. Its brick walls rose from a smooth stone basement; the same stone was used for windowsills and as a border of the top of the second floor. Like the Charles Offutt-Casper Yost house (see above), the first two floors were a relatively simple rectangular block. The third floor, however, with its bold, almost two-story dormers with large, rectangular, stone-transomed windows, achieved a monumental effect. The addition of a stone porte-cochère at one side lent the house a further sense of distinction.

American Contractor's Chicago building permit database reported the issuance of a building permit on March 11, 1899, p.19. The building's location is unclear as there were several Hamilton streets in Chicago at the time. Given Cobb's clientele and the locations of his other projects, the street currently known as Geneva Terrace (originally Hamilton Ct.) is the most likely location. Though no building exists with the address of 2450 N. Geneva Terrace, there is a building on that lot with the address of 600 W. Arlington Pl. Cobb is known to have designed the adjacent buildings at 604 through 608 W. Arlington Pl., lending credibility to this theory that 600 W. Arlington Pl. may be of his design also. This building bears some similarity to the George Geier Apartments at 3059 N. Southport Ave. (see Residential: 1900– and undated). Swank was most likely a speculative builder and not the occupant of this house.