William Deknatel » Architects + More

Born in 1907 in Chicago, William Ferguson Deknatel was educated at Princeton from 1925 to 1929. There he became friends with Winston Elting, who would later be partners both to Deknatel and Paul Schweikher. After attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1930, and marring interior designer Geraldine Eager there, they both returned to the U.S. in 1932, where they were among the first to study with Frank Lloyd Wright in the Taliesin Fellowship. Deknatel designed a number of residential buildings in the 1940s and ’50s, including Walter Kohler’s “Windway” house in Kohler, WI (1937), the Good Housekeeping “Better Living” House (1939), the Newton Noble House in Barrington (1940), the Lambert Ennis House in Evanston (1941), the Emery Lancaster Farm in Quincy (1946), the Russell Fisher House in Glenview (1949), the Louis Cohen House in Highland Park (1954) and the Maurice Rosenfield House in Glencoe (1956). Deknatel retired from architecture in 1971 and died two years later.