Wheaton's Danada House gets $1.8 million natural makeover

It's as if a floral bomb exploded outside the Danada House at the home's namesake forest preserve in Wheaton.

After three years of planning and another year of building, renovations to the property are complete, and now landscaping elements tie the house and the horse farm together through a variety of gardens.

The $1.8 million project was funded through donations, grants and taxpayer dollars.

"There hadn't been too many improvements to the connectivity in the property, and we wanted to address that with this restoration," said Kevin Horsfall, the district's supervising landscape architect.

An array of gardens and environmentally friendly landscape features now dot the grounds at the forest preserve. Most of the new features can be accessed along a new walking path that was built to showcase the restoration efforts. Thousands of flowers - both native and decorative - fill the various gardens, but won't add to the annual operating costs of the preserve, forest preserve officials say.

The design of the restoration effort was based on a theme of "bringing people to the threshold of nature," that was coined by forest preserve commissioner Carl Schultz. Many of the gardens offer seating on the edge, but visitors can also walk through the floral areas on paths or labyrinths.

The district spent about $200,000 on each new feature, Horsfall said. That includes a new atrium courtyard outside the banquet hall. Water features in the courtyard are all provided by captured rainwater. The materials used to build the patio in the courtyard are made from a cellular PVC foam-based product that will hold up to the elements for a longer period than wood, Horsfall said. Fences erected near the natural areas are made of another hybrid eco-friendly material that is also fire resistant so they won't burn up during routine prescribed burns of the prairie.

Many of the gardens feature planted flowers to honor the gardening legacy of the property's former matriarch Ada Rice.

"We used the history of the site for everything," said Andrea Hoyt, the district's director of planning.

Daniel Rice was a successful commodities broker and businessman. He and Ada bought the mansion now known as Danada House and its surrounding acres for their horse breeding operation, which produced a Kentucky Derby winner. But the couple perhaps was best known for their philanthropy; their charitable Rice Foundation continues today. The Rices both died in the 1970s.

Horsfall's team also set aside space and created a "Native Display Garden" for the flora that is naturally in the forest preserve and other parts of the county. A stately, spindly and massive Burr Oak tree is the centerpiece of the garden.

Down the path from the native plants is a sensory garden where visitors are treated to bouquets of brightly colored and aromatic flowers and plants. Horsfall said the planning stages for the project specifically targeted different botanical uses.

"We don't want to duplicate what's happening at Morton Arboretum or compete with Cantigny," he said of the two renowned neighboring plant sanctuaries.

Because the Danada House is often used by wedding parties as either a location for their nuptials, reception or both, the district created a wedding area that will seat about 150 people on a specially designed synthetic turf. The faux grass eliminates the need for turf maintenance, is green year round and can be used 30 minutes after a rainstorm because the water runs off and doesn't create mud.

"We spent almost two years researching this to find something that satisfied the functions and not look fake," Horsfall said.

The wedding area overlooks the property's new formal garden, which is the one spot that district officials plan to make even bigger in the future when donations or grant funds become available.

Other new features include a front plaza where the house's old driveway was once located as well as an east plaza "gathering cove" designed to resemble a horse stable. The new features are open to the public daily at the Danada Forest Preserve 3S501 Naperville Road, just north of the Warrenville Road intersection. For more information, visit dupageforest.com.