The Cottage Next to the Lodge at KLM Is About to Become Hinsdale's Next Public Room

If you walk the loop at Katherine Legge Memorial Park often enough, you stop seeing the Lodge and start seeing the two smaller buildings beside it. A steep-roofed cottage and a squat studio, both quiet, both fenced off in places, both clearly older than anything else on the property. Most residents know they were moved here from somewhere else. Fewer know that the plan for them is now specific, funded in stages, and being actively pushed through the Village Board.

The short version: the cottage and studio are getting turned into a cafe, a museum, and a rentable event space. The name is Zook Commons. Here is what that means, why it is happening at KLM specifically, and what has moved on it in the last twelve months.

What you have been walking past

The Lodge at KLM was designed by R. Harold Zook, built in 1927, and sits on 52 acres of woodland that Alexander Legge established after his wife's death and that the Legge family later donated to the Village of Hinsdale in 1973. That much is on the Village's own signage and inside the Lodge's own history page. The Lodge does the work of a wedding and corporate venue and always has.

The two structures next to it are different. They are Zook's personal house and his working studio, built in 1924 at 327 South Oak Street, where he lived until his death in 1949. He designed them for himself. That fact is the reason they are worth preserving at all: Hinsdale has other Zook homes still standing in the neighborhoods, but this is the one he actually lived and drew in.

How they got to KLM in the first place

In 2004 a developer bought the Oak Street parcel intending to demolish both structures. Landmarks Illinois put the property on its 2005 Most Endangered Historic Places list that March, which generated the publicity and donor interest the Hinsdale Historical Society needed to intervene. The Society raised roughly $800,000, and in May 2005 the buildings were physically relocated to KLM by Dillabaugh, Inc. of Crown Point, Indiana. Landmarks Illinois handed the effort a Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Preservation Award for Advocacy that October.

Since then, restoration has been incremental and donor-paced. The Society has replaced the pseudo-thatched "rolled eave" roof and completed the first floor of the Studio. The rest has been waiting on the money, and on a clear plan for what the buildings would actually be used for once they were stabilized. That plan is what changed in the last year.

"It wasn't just a cute aesthetic. It was part of a revolution."

That was local architect Michael Abraham, speaking at the Lodge on June 4, 2026, as part of the Hinsdale Public Library's After Dark on the Road series. Abraham is a Historical Society trustee, has restored multiple Zook homes in the village, and was closely involved in the 2005 move. His talk was not a Zook survey course. It was a fundraising pitch dressed as a lecture, and it worked because the crowd was standing thirty feet from the buildings in question.

What Zook Commons is actually going to be

Alexis Braden, the Historical Society's board president, described the finished vision at that June event and again in Village Board hearings. The program has four components sharing two small footprints:

• A European-style cafe operating out of the main house
• A museum telling the story of Zook's influence on Hinsdale and on Chicago residential architecture more broadly
• Open exhibit and program space for rotating shows and classes
• A rentable event space for social celebrations, similar in spirit to what the Lodge already does but at a smaller scale

That last piece matters more than it looks. The Lodge holds up to 250 people across both floors and prices out for weddings of that size. There is no comparable small room at KLM. A restored Zook Home sized for a 30-person birthday, shower, or memorial fills a gap in what the park can host, and it does it without pulling bookings away from the Lodge itself.

The cafe is the piece residents will feel most. Right now there is nowhere at KLM to buy a coffee. The disc golf course, the platform tennis courts, the trail loop, the off-leash dog area with its split morning-and-evening seasonal hours — all of them terminate at your own car. A working cafe inside a Zook cottage changes what a Saturday morning at KLM looks like.

The 2025 and 2026 milestones

The public timeline compressed noticeably in the last nine months.

In November 2025 the Historical Society appeared before the Village Board asking for local landmark designation on the Zook Home. Carrie Rozich framed the request as protection for what she called "a living tribute to R. Harold Zook's vision blending history, artistry and belonging for generations to come." Landmark designation matters because it locks in protections against future modification and because it strengthens the Society's grant applications.

The May 2026 Hinsdale Cooks! Kitchen Walk featured a Zook-designed home at 4 East Fifth Street restored by designer Mimi Collins, explicitly tied by Braden to the Zook Commons fundraising push. The Kitchen Walk is the Society's largest annual revenue event and supports its three properties: the Zook Home and Studio, Immanuel Hall, and the Hinsdale History Museum. Putting a Zook on the tour in the same season the campaign is running is not coincidence. It is the same tactic that got the buildings moved in 2005, run again with better donor infrastructure.

Then the June lecture at the Lodge itself, holding the fundraising audience inside a Zook building while pointing at the two next door. If the pattern holds, expect additional public programming through the fall aimed at the same audience.

Why any of this matters if you already live here

Zook designed roughly 34 homes and commercial buildings inside the village during his lifetime. Some are on the Hinsdale Historically Significant Structures Property List. Some have been renovated by owners who know exactly what they have. Some are one estate sale away from being replaced. The village's preservation program, which offers zoning and fee incentives to owners of listed homes, has generated more than $12 million in new construction on protected properties since it started in 2023, according to figures village planner Bethany Salmon presented to the Village Board this spring. The Zook Home at KLM is the anchor of that whole ecosystem. It is the only Zook property in Hinsdale that will be publicly accessible.

If you own a home in a Zook-heavy pocket of the village, that public accessibility is a small but real amenity. It is the difference between a piece of local architectural history that anyone can point at on a walk and one that only shows up on the Kitchen Walk one Friday a year. It also gives a defensible answer to buyers coming from Oak Park or the North Shore who ask why Hinsdale takes its 1920s stock as seriously as it does.

For everyone else, it is a cafe, a museum, and a room to rent, all inside two small Cotswold-style cottages under mature oaks, next to a Lodge that has been doing the heavy civic lifting alone for fifty-two years.

The fundraising is not done. Neither is the interior work on the main house or the second floor of the Studio. But the plan is specific enough now that the buildings have stopped being a preservation project and started being a use case. That is the shift worth watching.

If you are thinking about a move into or out of one of Hinsdale's Zook-adjacent pockets, or you just want a read on how the village's preservation program is affecting values on the ground, Second City Agents tracks this street by street. Schedule a free market consultation and we will walk you through what is holding value in this part of town and why.