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The neighborhood had once been elegant and thriving but had since declined. As the story goes, a wealthy businessman and his wife bought much of the block in the early 1900s, building a large Prairie-style house and later constructing similar houses for each of their four daughters. At some point, the main house burned to the ground, and the daughters' homes eventually became derelict and were bulldozed. The street has been mostly vacant since. The idea that Bellamy would spend a lifetime on North Prairie Avenue was inconceivable to him at the time — but one he later found grounding, he says. His parents had grown up a couple of streets away, and although they moved to Highland Park after they married to raise a family, this area had always been in his DNA. Bellamy slowly turned the garage apartment into a quirky stone cottage for himself, and over the next few decades, he bought several adjoining properties — about an acre in total. "As I bought new property, I'd build new structures or a stone wall," he says. "I had incredible stonemasons from Mexico who could build anything. If I found a cool old window or door somewhere, that would inspire me to build something new. So, there are these little follies everywhere." To help fund his follies, Bellamy waited tables at Strictly Tabu, a legendary dive on the edge of Highland Park that sometimes paid him with furniture. A compound of sorts emerged, peppered with eccentric structures assembled from found materials such as By Rebecca Sherman. Photography Pär Bengtsson. Styling Christopher MacKinnon, IA Agency. Painting purchased from a fair in Palm Springs. Restoration Hardware chair. The trunks of Japanese maples are shielded from dog Riffi's scratches by bamboo stalks. When a column and capital didn't work for another project, Robert Bellamy buried part in the ground. A pecan tree in the background has been there since the 1920s.