Small but attractive indeed–Norwegian-American architects Michaelsen & Rognstad designed this Italian Baroque-inspired terracotta jewel for olive oil importer William Bertini in 1922. A renovation of an Italianate originally built in 1877, the building is a neat microcosm of the path of River North - a utilitarian mixed-use Italianate, a storefront and apartments for an Italian immigrant family, a steakhouse for decades, a procession of trendier restaurants beginning in the late 1980s, the conversion of the upstairs apartments into dining space, and a Michelin star in 2011 when the building housed Crofton on Wells. French restaurant Marchesa is the latest restaurant to occupy 535 N. Wells.
This was an early work in the career of the architects here, Christian Michaelsen & Sigurd Rognstad. Kids of Norwegian immigrants, they came from relatively working class backgrounds and lacked the connections for prestige projects, so their body of work is charmingly all over the place: vaguely Dutch refectories in Humboldt and Douglass Parks, the invented exoticism of the On Leong Merchants Association building in Chinatown, the Spanish Baroque Garfield Park fieldhouse, etc. One of the main through-lines in their work, however, was the heavy use of architectural terracotta.