Most 1918 Houses Have Hardwood. This One Has a Mosaic.
Paul Froiland and Michelle Russell brought us a house on Nuttall Road in Riverside. Three bedrooms, two baths, 2,199 square feet, built in 1918. On paper it's a century-old village home.
Then you walk into the kitchen and the floor is a mosaic. Not a tile pattern — hand-set pieces, thousands of them, running across the floor, up the counters and over the backsplash. The listing credits the work to designer Karen Wessels. It carries through the house and climbs the staircase risers.
That floor decided how we shot the whole thing.
WHY THE FLOOR CHANGED THE PLAN
A normal listing shoot works corner to corner. You establish the room, you show the light, you move on.
That does not work here. Point a wide lens at a mosaic floor from standing height and it flattens into noise — a grey-blue smear that reads as busy carpet. The thing that makes the house worth seeing disappears in the photo that's supposed to sell it.
So we dropped the camera. Lower angle, longer lens on the detail frames, and exposures bracketed hard because the sunroom windows are blowing out on three sides while the floor sits in shade. The tile had to hold its color and its edges. Everything else in the room was framed around keeping it that way.
The same logic ran upstairs. There's a gothic-arch stained glass window in one bedroom under a barrel-vaulted ceiling. Shot at the wrong exposure it's a black silhouette with a bright hole in it. Shot properly you can read the glass and still see the room.
WHAT RIVERSIDE ADDS
Riverside isn't a generic suburb and the photos shouldn't pretend it is.
The village was laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1869 — the same landscape architect behind Central Park — as one of the first planned suburbs in America. It's a National Historic Landmark district. The streets curve, the lots are irregular, and the tree canopy is old enough to close over the road.
That's why the exterior set isn't only the house. A buyer scrolling a listing in Riverside is partly buying the street. Aerials show the canopy and the way the block sits; the ground exteriors show the deck, the rear elevation and how the house meets its lot.
THE TWO-SIDED FIREPLACE PROBLEM
The living and dining rooms share a brick fireplace open on both sides. Good feature, difficult photograph — you can shoot one room or the other, and from most positions the opening reads as a dark rectangle.
The answer was to shoot from the angle where you can see through it. It's a harder frame to light, and it's the one that explains the layout in a single image instead of two.
WHAT WAS DELIVERED
MLS-ready photos, drone aerials and floor plans for all three levels.
Standard turnaround is 24 hours for photos and within 48 hours for video.
Listed by Paul Froiland and Michelle Russell of Russell Froiland Residential, brokered by Keller Williams ONEChicago.
FAQ
How fast do you deliver photos and video?
Standard turnaround is 24 hours for photos and within 48 hours for video.
Do you shoot older homes differently than new construction?
Yes. Older homes usually have the feature worth selling — original tile, stained glass, a fireplace with an odd geometry — and it's almost always the hardest thing in the house to photograph. Newer builds are more uniform, so the work is about light and flow rather than protecting one detail.
Is drone included?
Six aerial photos come with every package, including the $200 Base. In a village like Riverside the aerials do real work, because the tree canopy and the street are part of what a buyer is looking at.
Do you shoot in Riverside and the near-west suburbs?
Yes — Riverside, Berwyn, North Riverside, Brookfield, La Grange and the rest of Chicagoland. No travel fee within about 45 minutes of Mount Prospect; past that, a travel fee based on how far.
Do I need to be there?
No. Most agents give us lockbox access and get the gallery the next morning.