Their Home Had to Be Fashion Forward. But Above All Else, It Needed a Killer Closet.
Ralph Lauren meets Tom Ford inside this sleek and sophisticated Chicago house, which cost $1.8 million to build
4 min
If Kelli and Fei Wang’s house had a soul, it would be the walk-in closet.
The house, in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighbourhood, is designed around the couple’s love for fashion and includes a 300-square-foot custom closet, with charcoal-suede wall covering and cerused-oak shelves, amplified by a vanity within a 40 x 60 inch mirror. There is a separate accessories side room, modelled after a showroom, where Kelli’s collection of designer bags and shoes sit on shelves and where she hangs out on a silver love seat.
In the couple’s previous home in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, they had to change out their wardrobes every season, hauling clothes from their apartment to their storage unit in the building’s basement, because there wasn’t room for it all upstairs.
“I wanted to never do a closet swap again,” says Kelli, 42, dressed in a floaty, cream-coloured shirt dress from Sandro Paris and light pink Manolo Blahnik pumps. “The closet was the first thing I thought about for the house.”
The Wangs bought their Ukrainian Village property for $511,000 in 2016 and tore down the existing 2,500-square-foot, three-bedroom, old brick home on it. The new house, finished in 2021, is 5,000 square feet, has three bedrooms and cost $1.8 million, with about $100,000 of millwork, carpet and furnishings going into the primary closet alone.
To design the house, the couple hired Dan Mazzarini, the principal of New York-based BHDM Design, who was a director of store design at Ralph Lauren for six years and also worked on Michael Kors, Calvin Klein and Kate Spade retail spaces.
Mazzarini knew Kelli from college, and understood the couple’s love for fashion: they’d shopped together many times in New York, where Fei had a special affinity for the Ralph Lauren store on Madison Avenue.
“I wanted to live in the Ralph Lauren store,” says Fei, 46, dressed in a custom-made Pini Parma shirt and a Boggi sweater. “It makes you feel elegant, elevated, and classy.”
As a guide for the house’s overall aesthetic, they decided on “Ralph Lauren meets Tom Ford, a mixture of buttoned up and timeless sophistication and sexy, modern, crisp elegance,” says Mazzarini. That meant a lot of black, white and charcoal.
That mixture can be seen throughout the house. In the living room, open from the kitchen on the main floor, a Ralph Lauren influence can be seen in the classic white sofa, while the angles of the coffee table and the chairs are more Tom Ford, says Mazzarini.
Tom Ford comes out in the kitchen, where the black granite counters, black-matte open shelves and stainless-steel appliances have a “refined industrialism,” says Mazzarini. The dining room has a crafty Ralph Lauren chandelier and white leather chairs.
On the second floor, Fei’s office is “menswear-oriented” It has a modern, crisp, geometric style, with a glass coffee table, an oversize black linen sofa, and dark grey flannel curtains, like a suit, says Mazzarini. The red fox fur and brown velvet pillows, the rosewood desk and the nubby rug add more classic textures.
The primary suite, with its bathroom and the centrepiece closet, takes up the entire third floor. It is designed in part after the Bulgari Hotel Milano, where the couple stayed on one of their first trips to Italy. The furnishings include grey-velvet drapes, an ebony headboard, a leather bench and a large brown-velvet armchair.
When designing the closet, Mazzarini says he asked the couple how many suits, shoes, bags and accessories they had—and that number kept growing as the home-building process progressed, going from around 50 to more than 100 pairs of shoes for each. While the overarching goal was beauty and style, it also had to be comfortable—and to reflect what Mazzarini calls the couple’s “Midwestern warmth and hospitality.”
Fei was born in Shanghai and grew up in Chicago, where his father was getting a Ph.D. in chemistry. Living on a teacher assistant’s budget didn’t leave much for buying designer clothes, but Fei says he “always had an eye for fashion—it was innate.” He says his parents, who grew up when many Chinese people wore blue worker’s suits, weren’t interested in subsidising his passion, so he started working in a clothing store when he was 14 years old. The first suit he bought himself was from Banana Republic.
He graduated from Illinois State University in 1999 and then from the University of Chicago with an M.B.A. in 2004. He went to work in asset management at Morgan Stanley, then to J.P. Morgan Asset Management and UBS before landing again at Morgan Stanley in 2021, where he is now a senior vice president in family wealth management.
Kelli also remembers a passion for fashion from a young age. Growing up in Piqua, Ohio, north of Dayton, she couldn’t afford to buy designer clothes, so she mixed and matched, she says. She graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and went to work at J.P. Morgan Asset Management before moving on to Merrill Lynch and Centric Wealth Management in 2018, where she is currently director of financial planning.
Fashion is central to the couple’s relationship. When they first met in 2008, when they were both working in J.P. Morgan’s wealth management unit in Chicago, each noticed the other’s clothes. “She was chic and classy,” says Fei. “I pay attention to style.” Kelli remembers the first time she saw her now-husband walk by in a suit. “He looked the Wall Street-financier part,” she says.
After their wedding in Lake Como, Italy, the couple honeymooned at JK Place (now called The Place), in Florence, a hotel that also influenced the design of their home. They started traveling to Italy and France every year because they love traveling and shopping together, and they both appreciate the goal of having the best experience possible, whether it is food, art, clothing or design. “The downside of that is there’s no voice of reason,” jokes Fei.
The Wangs say they have passed their fashion appreciation on to their 2½-year-old daughter, Gemma, who loves to hang out in the accessory room of the closet, where she tries on her mum’s shoes. In Gemma’s own bedroom, a shelf is filled with miniature designer bags: Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Louis Vuitton. “She has a better sense of style than both of us,” says Kelli.
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After half a century in the same hands, The Palladium blends Art Deco heritage, cinematic history and beachfront living in one extraordinary offering.
3 min
In Sydney’s Northern Beaches, there are plenty of homes with a multimillion-dollar view and an enviable position close to the sand.
This unique listing has all that, but it has also earned its page in the local history books.
After 50 years in the same hands, The Palladium in Palm Beach—once a famed dance hall, then a restaurant, a private residence, and an artists’ studio—is now back on the market with a price hopes of $13.5 million through BJ Edwards and David Edwards of LJ Hooker Palm Beach.
Positioned in a rare corner spot where Ocean Rd meets Palm Beach Rd, The Palladium has been front and centre observing the famous sandy stretch for almost a century.
Built in the early 1930s, the Art Deco building was originally conceived as a vibrant community dance hall; the “it” place to be for young folk during Sydney’s thriving interwar period.
Often the dances were held to raise money for the Palm Beach Surf Life Saving Club, and newspaper reports of the time told of rowdy parties lasting until the early hours, bootleg liquor arrests, and where shorts and sandals—or even pyjamas—were scandalously worn by “both sexes”.
Over the decades, The Palladium has worn many hats.
By 1943, the original owner, Joseph Henry Graham, had defaulted on his loan, and a mortgagee sale reportedly sold the building for £1550, which translates to about $137,000 today. It later became a dining space and a general store run by the Milton family. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the property was also home to the Blue Pacific Restaurant.
The current owners acquired the keys in 1976 when it began its next chapter as a creative hub. One of today’s vendors, filmmaker David Elfick, who has been a filmmaker and producer on such films as Newsfront and Rabbit-Proof Fence, has told stories of a free-spirited creative hub that has been used for film sets, to store numerous movie props, as editing rooms, to hold countless parties and has even hosted visiting members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
From its famed beachside soirees to its grassroots film club nights, the venue has become woven into the cultural fabric of Palm Beach.
Today, that rich history has been reimagined into a coastal home that honours its past while embracing contemporary beachside living.
Built in a unique architectural style known as streamline moderne, the aeroplane hangar-like building reflects the era’s fascination with air travel, mass transport, and modernity. The facade is defined by a sweeping curved roofline and subtle nautical cues.
The main residence features a vast central living space framed by a number of bedrooms and sunrooms, as well as a front dining room and kitchen. In total, there are four to five bedrooms, three bathrooms and a powder room adjoining an upstairs loft space.
Big, broad windows draw in loads of natural light and provide iconic views, plus the sounds of the beach just across the road.
Many of the original elements remain, most fittingly the polished floors of the former dance hall. In the additional building at the back of the block, there is a separate, self-contained studio with its own bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and laundry. From its elevated deck, the outlook stretches across the full sweep of Palm Beach.
Outside, the expansive 1151sq m land parcel also features established gardens with veggie patches and standalone decks for quiet contemplation.
Sitting just across the road from the beach, the property is also within walking distance of local cafes and the surf club. Palm Beach Rock Pool is at one end of the beach, with the Palm Beach Golf Club and the water airport at the other end of the peninsula.
The Palladium and Palm Beach Studio at 16 Ocean Rd, Palm Beach are listed with BJ Edwards and David Edwards of LJ Hooker Palm Beach via a private treaty campaign with a price guide of $13.5 million.
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