In the nearly nine years since Helen Brach mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind a fortune now worth more than $30 million, few people have entered her large home on Wagner Road in Glenview.
Everything in the 11-room house is pretty much the way the heiress to a candy company fortune left it. Her expensive clothes are still on hangers in the closets. The knickknacks are where they always were, and the French provincial furniture is still in place, although a bit dusty from neglect.
That could change soon, however.
A Park Ridge group wants to make a designer showcase out of the house to raise money for the Park Ridge Youth Campus, a home for socially troubled youths. If that happens, the house that the late Frank V. Brach built in the mid-1930s would be opened to the public for the first time.
To some, the Brach estate brings visions of a haunted house where, for reasons still unexplained, the heiress to the Brach Candy Co. may have been murdered in February, 1977.
But to planners of the 19th annual Park Ridge Youth Campus Designer Showcase, the Brach house is seen as an opportunity.
”When we first saw this house, we thought it would be wonderful. The designers would love it,” said Joan Maxwell, a coordinator for this year`s showcase. ”After more than eight years of sitting there, the house could use a little spiffing up.”
The showcase would enlist the best and brightest interior decorators in the Chicago area. Each of the 11 designers would be given a room to redo and show to the public. Two hundred interior designers have been asked to audition for this year`s show.
It is not certain, however, that the Brach house will be this year`s showcase home, and time is running out for a decision. The showcase is held in May.
Edward V. Donovan Jr., a Chicago attorney who represents the Brach estate, said a designer showcase in the home is contingent on its being sold. The home and its 6 1/2 acres of land have been on the market since November for $1.25 million.
The sale is part of an ongoing effort to dispose of assets of the Brach estate, which also includes farms in Illinois and homes that Mrs. Brach had in Ohio and Florida.
Mrs. Brach, the third wife of the late Frank Brach, has not been seen publicly since she checked out of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., on Feb. 17. 1977, after a routine check-up that found her healthy.
No clues as to what happened to her have been found. In 1984, after being missing for seven years, she was declared legally dead by Cook County Circuit Judge Henry Budzinski.
Donovan said he does not feel one way or another about opening the house to the public. Before such a showcase, all of Mrs. Brach`s possessions would be removed. One prospective buyer of the property has expressed an interest in showcasing the house, Donovan said.
