Tina Wyder grew up in a Chicago bungalow whose classic features had been stripped out of it and had seen many others in a similar state. So when she saw this one, on Bernard Avenue in North Park, when house hunting with her husband, Todd, in 2002, she understood what a rarity it was.

They had found a bungalow that nobody ever bungled.

“This house was lucky enough to survive the 1960s and the 1970s without being changed inside,” she says. “So it’s got a lot of its original features.” Among them are stained-glass windows and cabinet doors, extensive quarter-sawn birch trim that has never been painted and, seen at left in the photo at the top of this story, a stamped-leather wall covering and artful tile floor in the foyer.

After buying the house in early 2003, the Wyders did a lot of upgrades, modernizing the kitchen and baths, raising the roof to turn a semi-attic into living space, and enhancing the original look with such additions as the Arts & Crafts wallpaper board beneath the crown molding.

Every change was made with an eye toward “staying close to the original look,” Todd Wyder says.

The one place they broke that rule was in the backyard, where the couple added a 3,000-gallon koi pond with a waterfall and a bridge. While not a typical feature of Chicago’s historical bungalow belt, the sound and motion of the pond “chills you out immediately,” Todd Wyder says. And in that way, it contributes to the feeling that “this is a nice, warm place to come home to,” Tina Wyder says.

Now both retired—she from consulting and he from tech—the Wyders are planning to move to the Pacific Northwest. They’re putting the bungalow, five bedrooms and roughly 4,200 square feet, on the market today. Priced at $749,900, it’s represented by Carmen and Tony Rodriguez of Coldwell Banker.

Impressive as it was that the wooden ceiling beams and the built-in hutch that had never been painted, Tina Wyder zeroed in on one detail of the hutch: near the tops of the two wooden columns that flank the hutch is a carving of what appears to be a radish.

“That touch is what sold me,” she says. “I was like, I want to live with that hutch, with those radishes.” The glass doors and mirrored backs were all preserved from decades past, as was the art deco-style chandelier.

The floors are quarter-sawn oak.

Built around 1912, the house appears from the Wyders’ research to be the first built in the neighborhood, possibly as a demonstrator model, on land where the Budlong pickle factory’s greenhouses had been.

Like many bungalows, this one was built as a story and a half, the half being an attic that could later be built out into additional living space as the family grew. When the Wyders moved in, “you could barely stand up” in the attic. They lifted the roof, working with an architect to ensure they maintained the original lines, and clad the upper with painted wood shingles to delineate it from the original.

“You can have the worst day of your life, then go out there by the pond, and within two minutes it’s all gone,” Todd Wyder says.

The pond started out as a small water feature in the couple’s nature-infused garden, but eventually it grew to fill most of the side yard. The splashing sound of the waterfall and the sight of the koi swimming in their habitat is always a pleasant chaser for a glass of wine, Tina Wyder says.

“You need a bigger pond if you want more fish,” Todd Wyder says. It now houses 13 koi, who survive winters in the water.

The next owners of the home don’t have to be pond experts, the couple said. They have a regular maintenance service that can do all the work.

One of the changes the Wyders made was opening the foyer by removing a wall and a doorway that stood where the edge of the tile is visible now.

The original vestibule was there to reduce the loss of indoor heat in the winter, but a modern furnace makes that less of a worry. Taking the wall out, Todd Wyder says, made the original stained-glass window easier to get a good look at.

In choosing colors for the interior, the Wyders followed an Arts & Crafts notion sometimes attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: If you want to know what colors to paint the interior, look outside your windows.

The living room has original windows whose stained glass depicts a rose. They hang above original built-in bookcases on the sides of the fireplace.

The mantel is the only part of that composition that isn’t original, but it looks as if it could be, thanks to the couple’s diligent research on what would look right. The old brick mantel had been painted white at some point. They took that out and replaced it with natural-finish brick, in line with all the natural-finish wood in the house. Across its face runs a row of tiles by Motawi, an Ann Arbor, Mich., maker of tile inspired by historical styles.

The French doors open onto the front porch.

The porch looks out on a quiet, little-known neighborhood near a curve in the North Branch of the Chicago River.

Within a few blocks’ walk are Von Steuben High School, North Park University and Northeastern Illinois University, as well as a lovely ribbon of green space that begins at Field and Gompers parks and stretches northwest along the North Branch through pretty LaBagh Woods and for miles beyond. 

With wood, tile, and a copper hood and sink, the Wyders crafted a modern kitchen that echoes the original look of the house. The maple flooring is also new but selected to look old.

This isn’t where the kitchen was when they moved in. That’s now an office, off the right edge of this image. They made way for a new, larger kitchen by borrowing some space from a secondary bedroom and eliminating a sizable pantry from the era of stockpiling canned goods.

Like the kitchen, this first-floor bath looks as if it could be a holdover from the old days, but it’s entirely the Wyders’ creation. To capture the look, they combined a wallpaper pattern by William Morris—one of the leaders of the Arts & Crafts movement in England—with a clawfoot tub, multiple types of tile, an old-fashioned high-tank toilet, and a light fixture emblazoned with a floral design from Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Scottish member of the Arts & Crafts movement.

Lifting the roof of the house gave the couple an airy, high-ceilinged primary bedroom on the second floor, in a space where formerly, “you could only stand up in the middle three feet of the room,” Todd Wyder says.

The design of the room nods to the historical spaces downstairs, with built-in bookcases and a crown railing about where they have crown moldings. There’s more Motawi tile on the sides of the fireplace.

The fireplace is two-sided, with its other side facing the bath tub in the primary bathroom.

There are two more bedrooms and a full bath on the second floor, and two bedrooms (the originals) on the first floor.

While the pond may fill up the couple’s daydreams, it doesn’t fill the whole yard.

Because the lot is 40 feet wide and the house a standard bungalow’s width, they were able to fill the side yard with the watery amenity without giving up on having a backyard. Not seen around the bend from the patio in this image are a detached garage and a large planting area.

The sound of the waterfall is always audible in the yard, which helps make the yard “a great place to get away from the city,” Todd Wyder says. It now includes a waterfall with two levels, and a pair of bridges—one wood and a smaller one made of stone.

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