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How One Couple Hatched a Deal to Build a Dream House

For years on her twice-a-week walks, architect Elissa Morgante would pass a rundown little shack on a wooded lot with a Jeep halfway buried in mud out front. The property sat next to a path to a beach right on Lake Michigan in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Ill. In time she worked up the courage to knock on the door, telling the elderly woman who answered that she’d buy the house in a heartbeat. The woman said she’d put Ms. Morgante’s name on the list.

Then, one day seven years ago, Ms. Morgante walked by again, only to see the house torn down, trees cleared and a lawn put in. “Someone bought my house,” she dejectedly told her husband, Fred Wilson, also an architect.

Three years later, Ms. Morgante and Mr. Wilson struck up a conversation with a couple who had come to their home as part of an architectural tour of the neighborhood. The couple, Peter and Robin Baugher, invited them over to their house, which was also on the tour. Lo and behold, they were the people who had bought Ms. Morgante’s dream property—in order to protect the views at their home next door.

The Baughers weren’t looking to sell the land next door. “We thought only a horror would result from that,” says Mrs. Baugher, a 66-year-old artist. But they liked Ms. Morgante and Mr. Wilson so much, they suggested a meeting: Both couples should come prepared with the price they thought it was worth. Ms. Morgante and Mr. Wilson thought it was worth several million dollars, but they couldn’t afford that, so they decided to offer $1.5 million. At the meeting, the other couple went first: They suggested $1.5 million.

“We were like, ‘Oh my god, oh my god. This could actually happen.’ We were flipping out,” says Ms. Morgante.

It did actually happen. After months of meetings, the future neighbors agreed on legal covenants that protect each other’s views, and last year Ms. Morgante and Mr. Wilson finished construction on a $1.3 million, five-bedroom, five-bathroom house on the ½-acre lot, which has a sweeping lawn that leads down to the lake and a private white sand beach shared by three neighbors.

The couple, who own Evanston, Ill.-based Morgante Wilson Architects, consider this their dream house. It incorporates both the traditional style preferred by Mr. Wilson, 56, and the more organic modernist style of Ms. Morgante, 58. The front of the home is formal, made of red brick and white stucco, while the back has floor-to-ceiling windows to take advantage of the water views.

It’s also the first house they designed just for themselves, not around their three children, who are now in their 20s and not living at home. They didn’t hesitate to put in lots of glass because they weren’t worried about fingerprints.

They took chances with unusual, rich, textured materials, like kitchen cabinets upholstered in woven vinyl and leather wall panels. The curving, sculptural stairway is made from white plaster, a look inspired by New York’s Guggenheim Museum. A sculptural light fixture extends 30 feet from the second-floor ceiling down a stairwell to the basement.

Ms. Morgante and Mr. Wilson met in grad school at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They were both art students who gravitated to architecture. They’ve funded their increasingly expensive homes through buying low-value houses, fixing them up and then selling them at a profit. “People always ask us how we can afford to live here since we are architects and architects don’t make any money,” says Mr. Wilson.

Their first joint home-flipping project was in 1986, when they did a low-budget renovation to a tiny bungalow purchased for $100,000 in Lakeview, Ill. At the time it was a rough neighborhood—their car was stolen and their garage tagged with graffiti. They sold it two years later for $180,000 and bought their second home, a larger, two-family house in a safer part of the neighborhood for $100,000. They then spent $140,000 gutting that and turning it into a single-family home.

In 1994 they sold the second house for $386,000 and moved to Wilmette, where the schools were better, buying a 1,400-square-foot rundown house for $294,000 and putting it through a $300,000 renovation that added another 1,400 square feet. In 2006, they sold it for $1.2 million and bought the house across the street for $600,000, putting in $800,000 to renovate it. That house—the one on the house tour—was sold for $1.8 million. They plan to live in their dream home for the long term.

During the design process, the couple didn’t tell a soul, not even their families, what they were up to because they were afraid the lot owners would change their minds. One of the architects at their firm remarked on how the design was an unbelievable combination of both Ms. Morgante’s and Mr. Wilson’s styles. They just smiled and stayed quiet.

“It was such a fantasy. We didn’t want it to be too real in case it didn’t work out,” says Mr. Wilson.

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