David Teplica has Helen Brach’s sink. Apparently, one of the many things the candy heiress left behind when she disappeared in 1977 was an American art deco fixture in precisely the right style, vintage, and shade of white to go with the milky glass walls in one of the bathrooms at Teplica’s 98-year-old north-side mansion. He tried to get by with French deco porcelain at first, but the color was wrong. Brach’s basin was perfect, right down to the two little pegs in its feet that matched up so satisfyingly with two old dents in the bathroom floor.
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Details like those pegs have been Teplica’s obsession since he bought the mansion he shares with his partner, Kalev Peekna, in 1997. Designed by the prestigious firm of Schmidt, Garden & Martin, the place first belonged to Levant M. Richardson, who made his fortune on a patent for the use of ball bearings in roller skate wheels. Teplica supposes the house—near what was then the lakefront—served as Richardson’s “little getaway” from the stresses of life downtown.
“But my dad was a restoration architect,” Teplica says, “and so when I walked in I knew the potential. I was sort of trained by dad to see through to the fact that all the finishes on the wood were original, and all the plaster was original, and many of the fixtures.”
