Happy 120th Birthday to My Great Uncle and Maybelline Founder Tom Lyle Williams

By Sharriewilliams

Unk Ile as he was known by his family, will forever be known as the Greatest!
Tom Lyle, during the late 1930's and 1940's, lived on North State Street in Chicago. Know as a swanky part of the gold coast. He also owned the Villa Valentino in the Hollywood Hills in California.  He and his partner, Emery Shaver,  traveled back and forth between the Maybelline Company in Chicago and California, where they concentrated on advertising the Maybelline Brand, with Hollywood's biggest Movie Stars.

  Here is the building he lived in while in Chicago. It is a masterpiece of Art Deco design and influenced the remodel  at the Villa Valentino in 1938. http://chicago.curbed.com/places/fisher-studio-houses

 Take a virtual reality tour, of this Greta Garbo gorgeous, remodeled building and imagine what it must have been like to live there. 

 http://www.chicagomag.com/Radar/Deal-Estate/August-2009/Thoroughly-Moderne-Rebori-mdashGold-Coast/


10 IMAGESA couple of units in the famedFisher Studio Houseshave hit the market this year, and this week one more has gone up for grabs. Designed by architects Andrew Reboriand Edgar Miller and built in 1936, the landmark art moderne building located in the Gold Coast surprisingly (or not surprisingly) contains some of the neighborhood's most affordable residences. Back in the day, the building was one of the snazziest in all of the city, however, today, the units' spiraling staircases, curved walls and glass block windows can make for difficult living and thus can be had for a bargain. This particular one bedroom, one bathroom is seeking only$259,000. In the mid-1930s, Frank J. Fisher, a Marshall Field’s executive, commissioned the architect Andrew Rebori to design a residential property that would also generate some income. Rebori recruited the muralist and craftsman Edgar Miller to help detail the spaces with stained glass and other finishes.
Completed in 1937, the building—known originally as the Fisher Studio Houses and situated at 1209 North State Parkway—is an Art Moderne landmark whose street face is a streamlined hatbox of painted brick and glass blocks. Beyond the front gate, 12 duplex apartments overlook a slender courtyard; Fisher lived in the three-story home at the rear.

 The Villa Valentino in the Hollywood Hills. Art Deco with a Mediterranean flair.To read more about Tom Lyle Williams and his Maybelline Company, established in 1915, read my book, The Maybelline Story.