His houses were all true to the North Shore ..., and they're outstanding. He had a knack, kind of a freshness to it, and it was good." A year or two after he went into independent practice, Robert Seyfarth built a gambrel roofed Shingle Style house on Sheridan Road in Highland Park, across the street from Frank Lloyd Wright's Ward Willets house (1901), and it marked a change in the direction of his design work - for the rest of his career his would design in an eclectic style combining Colonial Revival, Tudor and Continental Provincial elements with strong geometric forms. During his career Seyfarth would design 73 houses in Highland Park alone, where his output began before the time of his arrival as a resident and lasted until shortly before his death. Here he elected to ignore the notion that in later years was famously offered to young architects by the Sage of Taliesin "... go as far away as possible from home to build your first buildings. The physician can bury his mistakes—but the Architect can only advise his client to plant vines.". Almost exclusively a residential architect with the majority of his work in the Chicago area, he also designed projects in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky and Alabama. By the end of his career, he had designed over two hundred houses. One of his more important works is the Samuel Holmes House designed in 1926 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A shingle style house overlooking Lake Michigan, its landscaping was designed by Jens Jensen. Robert Seyfarth continued to live and work in Highland Park until his death on March 1, 1950. The Chicago History Museum Research Center has an archive consisting of drawings for 70 of Seyfarth's projects dating after 1932. Seyfarth is sometimes considered to be a "society architect", and an examination of the body of his known work will bear this out, but only to a certain extent. One client of this class, Willoughby G. Walling (1878–1938), of Winnetka, IL, is known to have mingled with European royalty and with at least one President of the United States in his capacity as the acting director general of the Department of Civilian Relief and as Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee of the American Red Cross. His brother William English Walling was recognized by W.E.B. Du Bois as the founder of the NAACP, and Willoughby himself "...became a major spokesman for the Chicago movement".